While rewriteable DVD vendors war over standards, more manufacturers of so-called comby or combo drives are stepping into the breach. At Comdex, CD-ROM drive leader LG Electronics announced its first combo drives, backing Ricoh, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba, which have shipped drives for several months. But while LG and others speak highly of the market for combo drives, other vendors aren't so sure. Mass. Other analysts refuse to verify those numbers, as the nascent market is simply too difficult to track. But by one way of thinking, combo drives were never really expected to exist at all.
Observers say that's because it's easier to burn new CDs without constantly swapping discs.
But the real reason, argued Mary Craig, an analyst at GartnerGroup Dataquest, San Jose, is simply the lack of DVD software. While users might like to watch DVD movies, only a handful of DVD-encoded software is available, most similar to the shovelware that combined several floppy disks onto CDs.