Hewlett-Packard announced on Monday two new DVD+RW drives that aim to address one of the major criticisms of the DVD rewritable and recordable formats: compatibility.
DVD+RW is one of several formats competing to be the standard for rewritable and recordable DVD drives and media. The others include DVD+R, DVD-R (DVD-recordable), DVD-RW (DVD-rewritable) and DVD-RAM.
One of the key issues in this donnybrook among the format backers is compatibility with the large number of DVD-ROM drives for PCs, stand-alone players and media that are currently in the market.
The significance of HP"s announcement on Monday is that its two new DVD+RW drives--the dvd200i and dvd200e--will support DVD+R, which has a higher degree of compatibility with DVD-ROM drives than DVD+RW.