Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to ship its first combination recordable DVD and CD drive for PCs starting this month.
HPs dvd100i drive will retail for $599 and enable users to record up to 4.7GB of information per DVD or 700MB per CD. Recordable DVDs will retail for $15.99 each, said officials in Palo Alto, Calif.
Recordable DVD drives are expected to replace CD-Rewritable drives as the storage medium of choice for PC users, but the lack of an industrywide format may hamper adoption. HP uses a DVD+RW format that it helped develop, but currently five incompatible formats are on the market.
For corporate users, DVD-RAM—developed by Panasonic—offers the greatest storage capacity. But unlike HPs DVD+RW, Panasonics design is not compatible with most DVD players.