For whatever reason that you might be interested in a rewritable DVD drive, be it the huge storage potential (anywhere from 4Gb to 10Gb per cartridge), or the ability for the cartridge to almost rewrite like a hard disk, there are a few factors that must be taken into consideration.

The first factor is a real doozy - Rewritable DVD drives are still ludicrously expensive. Starting from US$500 (about A$800) for a bare bones kit and going right up into the thousands for faster drives and MPEG cards, a rewritable DVD drive is not likely to be an impulse buy.

I can't talk about rewritable DVD technology without bringing up one of my most used topics, standards and compatibility. As with so many other new technologies there are no set standards, every company believes their system is better and will fight to the bitter end before submitting to the competition's standard. I've only heard about four rival standards thus far - DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW & DVD+RW - none of them look like clear winners in the foreseeable future.

If you remember the introduction of CD-ROMs four years ago and the "MPC" compatible computers (Multimedia Personal Computer), then you might also remember the first CD-R drives, they were called WORMs and were really only a bit of a myth in my little community. Not much was known about these elusive drives, although everyone knew that the starting price was above the $10,000 mark.

This has been the same starting point for rewritable DVD drives, with the first consumer viable product only available late last year. The following drives wont be available in Australia for a long time, with the exception of the Hitachi DVD-RAM which should be available by about July.

First off the block was the DVD-RAM, at the time of writing this is the only technology which is actually being sold to consumers at the moment, and it's not too hard to see why. There are two known DVD-RAM drives currently available to the US markets (the Creative DVD-RAM & the Hitachi as mentioned above), they're both practically the same.

Taking into account what should be possible with recordable DVD, DVD-RAM (as well as most of the other technologies) falls well short of my hopes and expectations. With a lowly capacity of only 2.7 Gb per side the DVD-RAM standard really didn't make good use of the DVD's capacity, this coupled with the fascination all of the companies have at the moment of mounting them inside unremovable cartridges makes for a low capacity standard which is not compatible with any DVD-ROM drive. That gets low marks in my book.

There are also the soon to be released drives by Panasonic, Sony, Philips and the whole list of others in a cocktail of different formats, but at the moment they're all stuck in the same 2.7Gb/cartridge based rut.

Rewritable DVD has not matured yet and will still be a fair way off before it's seen as a viable alternative to cheaper, easier to use storage such as the 2Gb Jaz or the 2.2Gb Orb drive.

I am still of the firm belief that rewritable DVD will not become popular until storage is increased to at least 5Gb per side and is backward compatable with at least the third generation DVD-ROM drives. Until then, I'll just keep hoping.

Tully Rosen