News for Wednesday, 25 May 2005

The production cost of CD-R and DVD+/-R media are almost similar due to the competition between DVD media manufacturers as well as DVD burner is becoming a default drive in our computers.
As a consequence, media manufacturer will gradually stop producing CD media. Dixon has officially announced that it will transform 30% of its CD media production lines to produce DVD media.
If other manufacturers follow this move, it will be the signal for CD-R EOL flag. Indeed, the price on the market for CD-R will increase while DVD media will keep getting cheaper. Only countries where an additional tax is applied for storage media proportionally to their capacity will have a delay in the transition between CD-R and DVD+/-R.

Verbatim has started manufacturing the first DVD-R DL. Those media will compete with the currently DVD+R9 available for quite some time already. DVD-R DL will be priced around 25$ for a pack of 3 media, a price higher than the DVD+R9. So we will have to wait that other DVD media manufacturers start to compete with Verbatim to expect the price of those DVD-R DL to decrease.

Barefeats made a comparison between iMac G5 2 GHz and Powermac G5 dual 2 GHz. One processor of the Powermac has been disabled to make a fair comparison between the two machines.
The iMac did it well in terms of CPU performance and seemed not to be disadvantaged by its frontside bus, slower by a third.
On an other hand, the 9600 had difficulties against the Powermac's 9600XT. It is 30% slower in most of the tests.
http://www.barefeats.com/imacg52.html

The firmware 1.50 for the DVR-109 is available. It improves reading and burning of all media and recognise much more different media, especially for the 8x burning.
Joachim made a ready-to-use version of the Logitec flasher which allows to install the 1.50 firmware under OS X:
DVR109_FW150EU2.sit