Inspired by a booming market for CD-RW disk drives, local manufacturers are gearing up to produce drives that unite all the major formats -- DVD, CD-ROM, CD-RW and CD-R -- in a single unit.
"In October Aopen will have a combo product, with DVD plus RW," said Tony Yang, marketing manager at the Acer Group affiliate. The product would also be able to read CD-ROMs, and read and write CD-R disks, he said.
DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) drives and the various CD drives all use 5-inch disks, but DVD drives can store about six times more data per disk and are expected to gradually take market share away from CD. Data can be written to CD-R disks once, while CD-RW disks can be rewritten many times. There is currently no universally accepted standard for writable DVD drives; most current drives can read disks, but can't write them.
Combining the various functions into one unit had not been a particularly difficult job for Aopen, Wang claimed. "I think the components are almost the same, but... they have to do some compatibility testing." While initially, the combo product will also need separate controller chips for DVD and CD functions, in the future, Wang said, "that will be combined into one chipset."
Wang accepted that the 'combo drive' would be more expensive than either a DVD or CD-RW drive, but stressed that it would cost less than the two types of drives combined. The retail price is still uncertain, but "around NT$13,000" was Wang's estimate.
The advent of the 'combo drive' would not curtail Aopen's CD-RW production, which currently stands at around 10,000 to 15,000 CD-RW drives per month, Wang said. "We will produce them at the same time, because I think they are different market segments."
The interest in 'combo drives' is partly driven by falling prices for CD-RW drives, which have recently been much more profitable than the CD-ROM and DVD formats. Typical prices had fallen from around NT$15,000 to NT$10,000 in only three months, Wang said.
At the same time, in a pattern familiar to makers of computer hardware, production volume is growing. "Maybe next year [CD-RW] will be the mainstream", Wang predicted. "Compared with DVD and CD-ROM, the CD-RW market will grow very quickly." Daniel Lee, spokesman for computer peripheral manufacturer, Behavior Tech Computer (BTC), said his company is still uncertain about the market for drives that combine DVD and CD-RW. "Maybe we will make a product, but maybe not now," Lee said.
Right now BTC's output for CD-RW is about 5,000 per month, at most 10,000, said Lee, adding that last month, it produced almost 600,000 CD-ROM drives. "So CD-RW only occupies a very tiny share of our market," he said. "I dare not say it's peanuts, but actually it only occupies a small portion. So maybe we will focus on CD-ROM drives."
BTC's main reason for producing CD-RW drives lies in keeping its engineering know-how up to date, and in maintaining links with customers, Lee explained. The company makes most of its money producing large quantities of low-end, low-margin products.
Although a number of Taiwanese companies are ready to sell large quantities of DVD or 'combo drives', Lee believes few, if any, will be able to do so this year. Disagreement over royalties payable to the foreign inventors of DVD technology, and shortages of key components will hinder their plans, he believes. BTC, for example, may only be able to produce 1,000 DVD drives per month this year, whatever the demand, he said.
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