Philips launches a DVD burner compatible with three formats

To be presented at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the new optical drive from Philips can record and play CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.

Blu-Ray is new the high-density disc standard from Sony. It can store up to 50GB of data on a single disc.

Ever since we got DVD “plus” or “minus”, the drives have been more and more compatible, reading and writing more formats. I frankly don’t like this. It’s great from the drive standpoint, but there is a bunch of media formats that the buyers have to be aware of when buying blank discs. While it doesn’t bother the geeks too much, it’s an annoyance to mainstream users and slows the prices descent (by mass production and commoditization).