Memorex Ships HD DVD-R Blanks, Gets Blank Stare from ConsumersS

As the HD-DVD burners and recorders slowly begin to trickle out, Memorex today began shipping HD DVD-R media. The 15GB single-layer discs will cost $20 apiece.

Maybe these blanks would work for archiving, but let's think about this for a minute. Spending $20 on a single blank HD DVD disc is not all that compelling when you can spend $50 and get a 200GB hard disk. Do the math: $1.33/GB for the HD DVD vs. $.25/GB for a SATA drive? That relatively slow write speed and extra cost of HD DVD discs pales by comparison to the 150MB/sec data transfer rate of SATA. But yeah, yeah, apples and oranges.

Now for HD video, that's another story. You can record 75 minutes of HD goodness on one of these babies. But good luck finding someone who has an HD DVD player on which to watch it.

Memorex HD DVD Discs Deliver Crystal-Clear High-Definition Recording []