Sony Electronics has upgraded its affordable RS series with DVD recording -- using a format-bridging DVD+/-RW drive.
The RS430G (about $1,400) has the Giga Pocket feature and DVD burner — which works as a 4/2/2X DVD-RW, 4/2.4/2.4X DVD+RW, and 16/10/32X CD-RW drive — as well as Intel’s Pentium 4/2.8C processor with 800MHz bus and Hyper-Threading; 512MB of DDR333 memory; a 120GB hard disk; and ATI’s 128MB Radeon 9200 AGP card. The RS420 ($1,050 after a $100 mail-in rebate) is similarly equipped with no Giga Pocket recorder and a 64MB Radeon 9200 card, while the RS410 (about $850) has a 2.66GHz, 533MHz-bus Pentium 4, 256MB of memory, and Intel integrated graphics with no AGP slot.
All three new Vaio RS desktops have both front- and rear-mounted IEEE 1394 ports, as well as USB 2.0, modem, and Ethernet ports and Sony’s easy-to-use Click to DVD authoring software for transferring video footage directly from a video camcorder or old analog tape to recordable DVD.
