First of all, SONY *IS* part of the DVD Forum, who created DVD-R. They were pretty much the ONLY company part of the DVD Forum and the DVD+RW Alliance.
Next of all, DVD+R came AFTER DVD+RW was created. DVD+RW was created as a Data Storage medium ONLY, and was later adapted for video purposes, by way of booktype modifying, or as it's now known: Bitsetting. DVD+R was the next step, a much more video friendly format, which also used bitsetting in order to reach a higher DVD player compatability.
In the long run, DVD-R is more compatible with DVD Players then DVD+R, although only just SLIGHTLY when DVD+R is bitset. DVD+RW on the other hand (when bitset) is more compatible with DVD Players then DVD-RW. Also worth mentioning is that DVD+RW is all in all a much more stable and better made format then DVD-RW.
DVD-RAM is *NOT* the fastest format... actually it's generally by far the slowest! Right now the maximum speed is 5x, although 12x has finally been announced, and 16x is expected to be the top speed. The thing about DVD-RAM is that it has incredible error managment abilities. The drive, when recording to DVD-RAM actually re-checks EVERY block written, and will mark bad-blocks as unusable if any are encountered. The end result, is that you should have a disc that NEVER fails during a recording process, and should always playback with no problems. This does not however mean, that DVD-RAM makes a good archival format... which is basically because it's a rewritable disc, and somewhat more prone to losing data over time then a non-rewritable disc. This is generally more of an issue with heat and sunlight exposure though (which rewritable media is more susceptible to then DVD-R or DVD+R media). |
