Pioneer announced today that a new external DVD/CD writer will be available in early May, 2004 at an open price in Japan. The DVR-S706-J is an external high-speed rewritable drive in a sleek design, capable of recording at up to 8x write speed with DVD+/-R discs and at up to 4x with DVD+/-RW discs with substantially low operation noise. The new external drive can sit vertically or horizontally and plugs into standard IEEE1394 and USB2.0 ports. The monthly production is expected to be 2,000 units.

The Pioneer DVR-S706-J employs Pioneer-developed eminent technologies to increase the recording quality and reliability in high-speed recording, which is so popular in the previous models: e.g. Liquid Crystal Tilt Compensator, Smart Laser Driver, Ultra Dynamic Resonance Absorber, Distributed Defect Real Management System (with the use of SAI's WriteDVD! software, supplied with the unit), and Precision Recording Technology.

Main features (1) High-speed recording of 8x on DVD-R and 4x on DVD-RW discs (2) Playback Compatibility in all DVD formats including DVD-RAM v2.0 and v2.1 without cartridge support. (3) High-speed recording and low noise operation (4) Various original technologies to improve quality and reliability in recording (5) Precision Recording Technology



Bundled Software for the DVR-S706-J

1) DVD MovieWriter Advance SE (by Ulead Systems) 2) VideoStudio 7 SE (by Ulead Systems) 3) RecordNow (by Sonic Solutions) 4) Write DVD! (by SAI) 5) Simple Backup (by Sonic Solutions) 6) WinDVD 5 (by Intervideo) 7) Performance Adjusting Utility

You can read the press release here