You forgot: All these burners are fast, but where is the media?

16x DVD (lack of media aside) is pretty dang fast. I'm looking forward to faster DL (and, again, cheaper DL media) burns. With DVR-109's and such at the $60 mark, might as well buy now and see where the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD wars go....
Besides, given the way the past has been, you will be able to buy the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD burners this fall, but no media for 'em untill next summer.

1. Hard to say.
2. You mean the availability of double-sided blank media? Those already exist, but they never caught on so they're super-rare. Double-sided dual-layer I've never seen, though.
3. Who knows. First the industry needs to decide on whether they'll merge and form one format, or not, or whether the drives will support just one format or the other, or both, etc.
4. My guess -- and it's nothing more than that -- is that they'll cost no more than double a normal DVD-R drive once they're being made in volume.
5. Any answer you get at this point is a complete stab in the dark. The formats aren't even finalized, much less in mass production.

Overall, you're just gonna have to wait.

tooki

I just jumped in and bought a lite-on DVD burner, 16x, burns all kinds of media (+R-R RW etc...), worked with Toast out of the box, would work with iApps if i installed the patch but haven't felt the need yet. And it ran me a whopping $58.

Just go buy the stupid thing!

Also, mine is a dual layer burner but the media is crazy expensive, like $5 - $8 per disk! I have a stack of 16x DVD+Rs I've been using and they work great. Should have bought it earlier.

I have a Philips Dual Layer inside a LaCie d2 enclosure, yes it is Dual Layer, but being honest I dont care about it, I am not going to spend almost $10 per Dual Layer disk. The media is kinda the bottleneck here, I can not find any DVD disc over 8x, being honest I am kinda happy when I can find 8x media!, now what I would like to find is rewritable dvd media.

where you shopping? 16x is everywhere - not as much as 4x and 8x, but its out there. Here is a 50 pack for $27 - pretty good deal.

Dual layer disks are usually sold in 5 packs for $25+.... wow.

(btw, love the location - that's clever!!)

the Old Europe my friend…

a 50 pack for only $27