Sanyo

It's been quite some time now that Sanyo has not announced any new optical disc drives. But it seems that development of new models of the main components of recorders and readers (such as optical pick up's, mechanisms and chipsets) was, and still is in full progress. Our own information is that a new Sanyo pickup is ready and supports both DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW writing. Sanyo mainly sells its components through OEM channels and currently many manufacturers plan to use it in their upcoming DVD recorders and other combo's.

This year Sanyo demonstrated its latest recorder as a member of the DVD+RW Alliance. Thus, the company chose to exhibit a drive supporting only the DVD+R/RW format in the new CRD-BPDV2. The drive supports 4x DVD+R and 2.4x DVD+RW writing, and 12x DVD reading. For the CD, the CRD-BPDV2 offers 24x/10x/40x CD-R/RW features and the well-known Burn-Proof, FlexSS-BP and Safe-BP. Speculation says that a simple firmware upgrade will enable recording on both formats.

The most interesting feature of the new drive is the so-called "High Density Recording" Technology or HD-BURN. The HD-BURN technology doubles the recording capacity (up to 1.4GB) on conventional CD-R media (700MB)!

The writing speed under the HD-BURN format corresponds to 24x, while the maximum reading speed reaches 72x!! The BURN-Proof is (of course) supported for the HD-BURN writing, in order to prevent buffer underun errors. Recording on CD-RW media is not currently supported but it will be included with a future firmware modification, at a 24x speed under the HD-BURN mode.

Ahead Nero Burning Rom and BHA B's Recorder Gold will support the HD-BURN in future software versions.

The recorded discs are not compatible with current DVD players, but this can be achieved with some simple modification or even with just a firmware update in many cases.

In the following table you can see a brief comparison between the CD and the HD-BURN recording technologies:

As you can see, in order to achieve such a high density, Sanyo has shortened the pit length, the modulation method is different and more efficient, and the error correction more robust.