I've just purchased the Pioneer 104 DVD-RW and I have to say its fantastic! The 104 is the OEM version (comes without software)of the Pioneer A04 which is a slightly updated version of the a03 although there appears to be very little difference between the A03 and the A04 I paid about £200 including VAT for the drive from an internet reseller. I have seen the drive retail for slightly less on the major auction sites but was a bit warey for what is quite a major purchase for me. It took me about 10 minutes to install in my PC and most of that was because I couldn't find a screwdriver to take the side pannel off. I have so far ...  Read the complete review

Introduction Pioneer is one of the DVD Forum founder members, together with a consortium of nine other manufacturers (Hitachi, JVC, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Philips, Sony, Thomson, Time Warner & Toshiba) are backing the DVD-R format. The other competing format is DVD+RW. The Pioneer DVR A03 is the first affordable consumer DVD recorder available. Pioneer has been making DVD writers for a few years now but they have never been affordable and the media has been prohibitively expensive. It was nicked named the "Super Drive" because of the fact that it could write (and read) on almost all modern optical disks i.e. CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW. (Pioneer has had an ...  Read the complete review

DVD is the currently evolving generation of CD-style discs, capable of storing 4.7Gb of data and full high quality Hollywood style videos. Many different versions of what the letters DVD stand for are around, but I'm going to stick with calling it the Digital Versatile Disc - and that's exactly what it is! What is a DVD? -------------- As with CD's, the possibilities are endless. With CD's you were limited to 650Mb (or more recently up to 700Mb) of data. This is sufficient for most home applications, but now that digital video editing is becoming more common in home computer systems, the space limitations caused by CD media, ...  Read the complete review