the media is expensive, however, the burners are not that expensive. I purchased one after Christmas at Best Buy for around $65. They are normally running under $100, and they can burn everything (CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, and dual layer DVDs) except DVD-RAM. From what I've seen, the drives will be adopted quickly, but the media will take a while to drop in cost. In the future, we may look back on the DL addition to the DVD writers as an eventuallity and not as the next step in optical media storage technology. The future of Blue Ray or HD DVD may be brighter (maybe not so bright for Blue Ray) but I wouldn't count out the DL DVD burners just yet. DL DVD burners still a bit expensive? What are they smoking?

Sure, Pioneer/Plextor/BenQ DL DVD burners are around $150 (Plextor has one for $132), however, most people aren't going to buy those anyway. The average DL burner is well under $100 (not on sale). A quick run to Newegg.com came up with DL DVD burners from AOpen, Sony, Lite-on, NEC, etc. Most of them were $59 and up.

over on this side of the pond, uk, we can pick up a dual-layer burner for £35 ,($65) but the media is £1.50 ($3) a disk compared with a normal disk of £0.25($0.5).....not worth the upgrade to dual imho and yes we think we are ripped off too