Fernando Gonzalez Gentile wrote:
>Today I noticed there are four kinds of DVD:
>
>1- DVD -R
>2- DVD +R
>3- DVD -RW
>4- DVD +RW
>
>The Superdrive which come built into some Powerbooks deal with all of them,
>but when I asked the salesman about which were the differences, he honestly
>answered he didn't know. OTOH, people buying DVDs there this morning were
>quite sure when answering whether they wanted a +R or a -R etc.
>
>
'R' means write once. 'RW' means ReWritable.
'-' and '+' are the result another of the endless format wars. Sort of
like Beta/VHS, but with the big difference that the media sizes are
indentical. There are some theoretical differences which I once looked
up on the web, but don't remember. It didn't seem to me there was any
big quality advantage to either.
'+' got off to a faster start and the blank disks were quite a bit
cheaper at first. Now prices seem to be similar and many drives read and
write both. There may be some issues with playability on DVD players?
For personal data/photo backup with a burner that does both, I don't
think it matters. However, there are a lot of installed drives out there
that only do one kind. So if you plan to send discs to others, you need
to know what they have.
Write speed is also an issue. The only 8x media readily and cheaply
available when I got my drive were '+', so that's what I have and I
think it's simpler to standardize. But then one of my sons gave me some
'-' RW discs, so I suppose I'll do some short term system backups on
-RW. The photo backups will go on +R media.
Moose
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