Toshiba debuts HD DVD rewriter for notebooks

Toshiba just launched the first slim HD DVD rewriter drive for the notebook market. With the new SD-L912A drive, Toshiba is offering consumer and business notebook PC users access to affordable next-generation HD DVD quality entertainment that delivers the full visual brilliance of high-definition content with the flexibility of re-writable HD DVD media.

For business users, the new re-writable drive can be utilised to back up large volumes of data-rich high -definition content from a PC hard drive. Single and double layer HD DVD discs are already available and offer capacities of 15GB and 30GB respectively. Triple layer HD DVD ROM discs that will offer capacities up to 51GB are currently in development and will be available in late 2007.

For consumers, the SD-912A is the perfect solution for capturing and recording the increasingly available high-definition content from leading broadcasters across the world. According to leading broadcast analyst Screen Digest, by 2010 there will be approximately 100 HD channels available in Europe and more than 11 million households accessing HD quality content(1). In addition, because HD DVD and current DVD discs share the same physical structure, the drive will support read and write functionality to HD DVD-R discs and high-performance, high-speed read and write to all flavors of standard DVD and CD discs.