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Pioneer unveils recordable DVD

The company says it's first to market with a recordable technology for the high-capacity, 3.95GB storage medium.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
Brooke Crothers
Pioneer has announced a recordable DVD (digital versatile disc) drive, the first company to do so.

The Japanese consumer electronics company is also shipping Windows software from Prassi Software for DVD-R mastering.

"Together, these products bring the first fully functional DVD-R drive to market," Pioneer said in a prepared statement.

DVD-R is a "write-once" technology that can store any type of digital information, such as video, audio, images, multimedia titles, and data files. DVD-R discs are usable on any DVD playback device including DVD-ROM drives and DVD video players, according to Pioneer.

DVD-R differs from upcoming DVD-RAM drives, which can record data many times.

The DVR-S101 drive is bundled with DVD Prassi's Rep software and five blank DVD-R discs.

"The Pioneer-Prassi bundle provides the DVD mastering market with the only DVD-R solution available," said Paul Dempsey, senior vice president of marketing and sales at Pioneer New Media Technologies.

The DVD-R format is similar to CD-R. Like CD-R, blank DVD-R discs are recorded in the DVD-R drive, which is controlled by the computer. The recording process itself is controlled by Prassi's "Rep" application software, which allows the user to specify which files will be transferred to the disc and to control the recording itself.

The drive offers 3.95GB capacity per disc, roughly six times more than a CD-R disc, and conforms to version 1.0 of the DVD-R specification.

The drive is available at a list price of $16,995. Additional DVD-R discs are available from Pioneer at a U.S. price of $49.95.