I´ve had a long history of dealing with a locally based company SVP Communications which dates back to the days that I was at college and used to go around to the owners flat and pick up black CD´s and the such that he used to sell from his garage. Time moves on however and just a few years later SVP has grown into one of the largest nationwide distributors of blank CD´s, DVD´s and all associated hardware.
Browsing their site today I discovered an NEC 2500 DVD rewriter for sale at an amazing £55.99 and so the thought struck me that now was the time to write an article on DVD writing since previously I haven´t touched on it too heavily as it was always considered to be an expensive pastime. The first thing to mention is that at this price the drive doesn´t come with any software or cables but this shouldn´t be too much of a problem; just use the cable from your old CD drive and the software you should need is all available on the Internet for very little or indeed free of charge.
The thought occurred that at this price it could be a potential lemon so I looked up the details of the drive on various forums and they all seemed to be pretty positive with giving the drive their best buy award.
In terms of speed, the drive writes to DVD writables at 8x speed (+R as well as -R) and writes DVD rewritables at 4x speed (+RW as well as -RW). As you would expect from a DVD writer it also writes to CD-R and CD-RW at speeds of 32x and 16x respectively. When reading CD´s or DVD´s the drive can read at 40x for CD´s and 12x for DVD´s. According to SVP these speeds should allow you to write a full hour of video onto a DVD-R disk in around 10 minutes. The tests on the aforementioned site showed the drive to be a bit slower in several tests when pitted against what is seen by many as the current industry benchmark, the Pioneer 107D but having said that it is also more than £10 cheaper in price and most home users wouldn´t notice the difference between the two.
We´ve established that the drive is cheap to buy but obviously the long term cost of owning any DVD writer would be the cost of the disks to record only it. Thankfully recordable media has also come down significantly in recent times with a tub of 25 writable DVD-R disks starting at around a fiver and again this price is from SVP. When you consider that this equates to just 20p per disks and that these disks will hold 4.7Gb of information, you soon realise quite how affordable DVD recording has become. Most people would be able to back up all the IMPORTANT information on their hard disk on to a single disk and of course, you can make backups of movies or programs that you legitimately own using a DVD recordable drive although these is a lot of controversy surrounding this at the moment so I´m not going to go into details on how this is achieved.
One thing to note about SVP is that they are not a customer facing retail business as such so you can´t make collections from their warehouse (they don´t have planning permission or insurance for a retail business and customer collections would take their emphasis away from the flourishing Internet business) so you will have to place the order online by visiting and have it delivered by courier. It may be an idea to join the buyers club on their site and you will be e-mailed with special offers including the special weekend shipping deals (typically 1p or 99p shipping) that surface on a regular basis. If you can buy the drive for £55.99 and get 99p shipping then surely there is no need to worry about the fact that it has to go by courier; you´d probably spend that much in petrol even if they did allow collections.
Computer ARticles 2007
