Within a year after I wrote my FAQ, DVD writers were just beginning to hit the consumer market. They were, however, quite expensive
and the media cost $40 per disk. Given the finicky nature of all optical drives, this made the writing of DVDs a very expensive
propostion indeed! If you think losing a 40¢ disk is bad, imagine ruining a $40 disk due to computer crash, buffer underrun or
similar error!
Though disks soon came out in the $25 range, they hovered in that range for years! The convenience of having 4.7GB of space on a
single disk didn't even begin to make up for the fact that this storage cost over 20 times as much per gigabyte as CDR storage.
There was no reason to contemplate or worry about copying commercial DVDs since the blanks cost more than most commerical DVDs did!
Even copying your treasured home movies, transferred to VHS from film a few years ago, to DVDs was a somewhat questionaable
prospect given the cost of DVD blanks and the dicey nature of DVD recording, not to mention the fact that many early DVD players
were unable to play DVDRs!
In the meantime CDR matured and both computers and their interfaces improved their speed and reliability (mostly through improved
DMA) so that they could handle higher speed CD writing and the data transfer speeds that would be required to write to DVDRs in a
reasonable amount of time. While that was happening controversy raged over which standard would be adopted for rewrittable DVD
disks even though very few computer users could yet afford just plain writtable DVDs!
Then suddenly, everything changed!
DVD writers came out with EIDE interfaces in the sub $500 range, a price which rapidly dropped to less than $200. DVD blanks came
out for less than $10 and soon after were selling for less than $5 each. Within a year, the price per disk was less than $2!
Now it actually made sense to use DVDs for data, with the blanks being cheap enough to be expendable and the writing process much
more reliable. At $2 each the storage cost per gigabyte was roughly equivalent to CDRs. Writing speeds had also improved with 4X,
8X and even 16X writing just beyond the horizon.
The commerical DVD industry which for years had relied on the high cost of DVD media to prevent bootlegging was really caught off
guard by these developments and was scrambling for ways to copy protect DVDs.
Of course, this was very good news for the video consumer because the low cost of drives and blanks made it very economical, once
their home movies/videos were transferred to DVD, to make multiple copies for backup and for giving out to friends and relatives.
DVD recorders, standalone units which can record video on a DVD, were introduced thus making it much easier to transfer VHS and
other media to DVD yourself rather than having to pay someone else to do it. By this time most DVD players on the market could play
DVDrs and even DVDRW/DVDram.
By 2005, DVD disks were available for less than 70¢ each in spindles of 50 and it was actually cheaper to record to DVD than
to VHS, even when Sony VHS tapes were on sale at $9.99 for a pack of 12!
So how does this affect CDR?
Since nearly every DVD writer ever made can also read/write CDRs, CDR disks aren't in any danger of becoming obsolete. But, when
the price of DVD writers dropped below $100, only the most tightly budgeted computer users saw any reason to buy a drive that
could write only to CDRs and when the price dropped into the $50 range even they didn't see any reason. Even if you don't plan to
write to DVDrs right away, it makes sense to spend another $15 or so to get a drive that has that capability. In June 2007 a visit
to local computer stores shows the shelf space occupied by DVD writers is 7 to 10 times that occupied by units that write only to CDRs.
