Philips 2 x 6 CD-R burns like a floppy drive
Called the CDD2600 (£619 + VAT list), the SCSI-hosted device is Plug and Play recognised by Windows 95 and Windows NT and can write in the CD-UDF format for fast operation. Likened by Philips to saving to floppy disk, UDF (Universal Disk Format) gets rid of the 12Mb overhead caused by multi-part recording and will be supported in DVD drives. Files created in UDF format can also be read by standard CD-ROM drives.
Greg Pine, Philips business development manager for CD-Recordable showed drag-and-drop burning with a 910Kb file transfer taking a few seconds to complete. "This is the ease-of-use model that will make CD-R a household word," Pine said.
The CDD2600 also supports all the standard CD formats such as CD-ROM and audio. It comes with three blank disks, control software, Gear Multimedia, Avery labelling software, and a tool called WebGrabber that can save Web sites to CD-R.
The Dutch giant expects sales into both consumer and business sectors for applications including audio recording, presentations, multimedia publishing, Internet downloading, exchanging large files and backup.
With Philips holding about a third of all OEM CD-R business as well as 12 per cent under its own brand, the product should gain a wide audience.