Sony USA made an interesting announcement. Three new DVD burners are to be released on the market. What is interesting is that 2 of them are external. This comes as a paradox as there is a much bigger need of such devices in Japan because of the fact that most laptops come with a flash-based hard drive disk that leaves no place for a DVD or CD drive. In USA, flash-based hard drives are a rarity and just few companies provide machines with this option. The market is just to small as to when it is compared with Japan. You can even purchase all sorts of drives from casual kiosks there.

Sony announced that the internal drive can be purchased this month for around $70 while the external drives, a normal and a slim one will be available at $110 and respectively $130. The slim one can record at a maximum of 8X speed or 4X for DL DVDs and the internal one and the other external device can record DVD-Rs at 20X, DVD-R DL at 12X, DVD+RW at 12X, DVD-RW at 6X and DVD-RAM for backup at 12X. CD-R can be recorded at 48X and CD-RW at 32X.

Design wise the slim external device is very interesting and looks very well. Specialists believe that it will be the most popular of the three models announced.