Press

Other World Computing (OWC), a leading provider of products and services for the Macintosh marketplace, today introduced the Mercury Pro DVD-R/RW, CD-R/RW FireWire solutions. These are the first external FireWire solutions that allow users to author and burn DVDs using Apple’s DVD authoring tool, iDVD. The Mercury Pro drive also works with Apple Studio Pro, iTunes, Roxio Toast, CharisMac Discribe, as well as many other CD/DVD authoring software.

“We see these drives being used by a variety of individuals and businesses,” said Larry O’Connor, president of OWC. “Whether to store family movies or photo journals that can be played back for ages to come, or to store backup files or multimedia presentations that can be played on most standard DVD and CD players, our solution covers it all, and we make it even easier by including support for standard Apple authoring software. The high capacity and low cost of DVD and CD media along with the plug-and-play ease of FireWire make our Mercury solutions an attractive choice for businesses and home users working with large, important files.”

The Mercury Pro plug-and-play drives are compatible with both Macintosh and Windows-based systems, and feature a Pioneer DVR-104 drive mechanism, built-in headphone jack, and power eject. Each drive comes with five pieces of DVD-R 2x media, 25 pieces of CD-R media, one piece of CD-RW media, and all connecting cables.

“Our DVD-R/CDRW drives are the first available FireWire solution to allow people to fully utilize iDVD,” O’Connor said. “Prior to this, iDVD could only operate using internal Apple/Pioneer Superdrives. Our Mercury Pro DVD solution provides users with everything they need to create, organize, share and store any digital content. This drive is revolutionary in that it consolidates two of the best digital formats into one small, convenient, plug-and-play solution.”

The Mercury Pro DVD-R/RW, CD-R/RW writes to industry standard 4.7GB DVD-R discs at up to 2x speeds, 4.7GB DVD-RW discs at 1x, up to 700MB CD-R discs at 8x, and up to 700MB CD-RW discs at 4x speeds giving users the ability to manage large back-up jobs, archive data, or create, edit and rewrite to the discs many times over.

For $399.95, customers today can purchase the Mercury Pro DVD-R/RW, CD-R/RW complete FireWire external solution. A FireWire/USB 2.0 version is also available for $429.95. Both drives are available exclusively through OWC at www.macsales.com.

For customers who purchased any OWC Mercury DVD-R/RW, CD-R/RW solution prior to July 29, 2002, OWC is offering a software package that includes the iDVD support and additional DVD authorizing software for $29.00.