DVD Burner Review

Evaluating reviews of DVD burners

The DVD burners covered in this report connect internally or externally to a computer. Please see our separate report if you are interested in home entertainment component-type DVD recorders, which can record from a TV.

The DVD burners covered here are used to install software from CD or DVD, back up your work to disc, play audio CDs and DVD movies, copy CDs and DVDs, create discs to share files or software between computers, record music or other audio CDs and record home movies. They do everything that CD burners and CD-ROM drives do, so you don't need to have two optical drives installed in your computer. All current models will burn to dual-layer DVD discs, which have an 8.5 GB capacity and cost about $1.50 per disc. They also burn to regular DVDs, which are less expensive and hold 4.7 GB of data.

The best and the most comprehensive reviews are on enthusiast websites that focus on disc burning and optical media. Those include CDRInfo.com, CDRLabs.com, CDFreaks.com and BCCHardware.com. Some of these sites have relationships with manufacturers, but reviews are convincingly objective and thorough. These websites conduct extensive testing using multiple brands of media, illustrating the test results with charts. The best reviews address the relative noisiness of drives. Many DVD burners sound like major appliances while spinning discs. This is annoying for any purpose, but a big deal for listening to music from CDs or watching DVD movies.

Mainstream media coverage of DVD burners is disappointing. Most computer and consumer magazines and websites sporadically review new products, and in the past couple of years, their focus has turned away from regular DVD burners to Blu-ray drives. Blu-ray is one of two competing high-definition DVD formats; the other is called HD DVD. At press time, many analysts are predicting that Blu-ray will win this format war because Warner Brothers just announced that it, like Disney, Sony and several other studios, will exclusively release its high-definition movies on Blu-ray discs.

In the computer world, Blu-ray also has a big jump on HD DVD. While DVD burner manufacturers have turned over their product lines at least once in the past year (making keeping current a challenge for reviewers), the high-resolution drives in particular have experienced very short product life spans. The LG GGC-H20L (*Est. $300) plays both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs, but only records CDs and regular DVDs.

Reviewers are beginning to recommend Blu-ray drives for your computer, but they still have many reservations. The technology is still immature ? compatibility problems are common, and while the prices are dropping rapidly, they are still very high.

If you want to play Blu-ray movies on your computer by installing an internal drive, the big concern is system requirements. Computers and monitors need to meet very specific requirements (see the "Internal Blu-ray DVD drives" section below) to work with Blu-ray movies. Also, Blu-ray drives are slow when burning conventional media.

The potential advantage other than playback of Blu-ray movies is that some drives can now record to Blu-ray discs, which can hold up to 25 GB of data on one disc. That could be an advantage if you have a high-definition camcorder and want to burn your footage to a Blu-ray disc, but keep in mind that in order to play that disc on your TV, you'll need to hook up your computer or buy a component Blu-ray disc player. Because of the laundry list of system requirements, high prices and compatibility problems, most reviewers don't yet recommend Blu-ray burners for your computer.

Reviewers generally believe that most people should wait until Blu-ray drives mature and competition drives prices down. Unless you have a specific immediate need for 25 GB storage on a single disc or want to play Blu-ray discs on your computer, a standard double-layer DVD burner is a better choice. If you need mass storage right now, an external hard drive is the less expensive, more mature option. Another alternative for data backup is a USB flash drive. A couple of 16 GB USB flash drives will cost about the same as the cheapest Blu-ray DVD burner.