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Review of Sony's DRU500A
After almost a two years of battle between manufacturers for the DVD recordable format standard , Sony corporation from Japan ran away with the grand prize. Why choose if you can do all ?
Sony introduced the DRU-500A drive , and since this week it is available on the US and Japanese market. It is expected in Europe end of November , just in time for the end-of-year shopping.
LabDV is proud to present the world's first real review of the drive and accompanying software
The Drive
Contrary to most other drives out there this is one is indeed made by Sony. The single standard drives are either made by Ricoh ( +R/+RW) , Panasonic ( -R / -RAM ) or Pioneer (-R / -RW ). Whether you buy HP , Memorex , Acer , Asus , Philips , or any other brand , you end up with one of those 3 chassis.
NEC has also announced their chassis called the NEC-1100 DVD recorder. This drive will be available later this year.
The drive breaks away from the standard dull looking plain vanilla models.
Most of the front is white , but the tray itself has a stylish silver holographic cover.
The drive is pretty heavy , and the mechanical construction is very well done. A solid tray with minimum creep and an all metal chassis.
The drive is full ATAPI / EIDE compliant drive. Installing it in a Firewire or USB2.0 box is no problem. ( I got it in a Firewire box based on the Genesys chipset ).
What's in the box ?
The drive comes with two leaflets on how to instal it , 2 CD-roms with software any any possible language ( english , french , italian , german , spanish , dutch , Chinese , Swedish , Portuguese , Korean and Japanese ).
The provided software includes Veritas Recordnow , Veritas DLA packet writing software, Sonic MyDVD , Veritas Simple Backup , Arcsoft Showbiz ,Power DVD and Musicmatch Jukebox
Software and Installation
The installer is a neat design but a bit awkward at first. You have to select an item from the list on left. When you move the mouse over an item , an animation shows what the item is. Now you would expect to click on the install button shown. Nope. You have to click on the item to activate the panel , and then you can click install. A bit strange at first. When done you have to click close in order to be able to re-select form the list.
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