TDK will start shipping the company’s first MultiLevel (ML) CD-RW drive in the second quarter and will introduce its first recordable DVD PC drive in March.
Bruce Youmans, TDK’s sales and marketing vice president of sales and marketing, said the ML drive will carry a $199 suggested retail price and will be targeted toward the enterprise and prosumer market for use primarily as a data archive device. The drive will take about six minutes to burn 2GB of data to a disc, which will cost $1.99 for write-once media and $2.99 for rewritable ML media.
Youmans said a decision has not been made as to which rewritable DVD format the upcoming drive would utilize, but hinted that TDK might go with more than one format. TDK does not expect the rewritable DVD market to take off for several years, but when it does, the company believes its primary consumer use will be for families to store home videos.
In other news, TDK will start producing three new types of blank media: DVD+RW, caddyless DVD-RAM and 8cm CD-R. Pricing was not available for these media at press time.
