The best option yet for recording your own DVDs. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. For consumers... it is confusing. The electronics industry is still battling over a standard for DVD recording. Apple and Compaq have been shipping computers with DVD-R drives. They allow you to write once to a DVD disc and play back on a standard DVD player. Then there are the DVD-RW and DVD RAM formats... the first designed for movies... the second for data. Now, Hewlett Packard is rolling out a drive based on the DVD+RW format that combines the best of both. Re-writable and it works in regular players. HP's Christine Roby...

"We expect them to be on the shelves in the middle of September and the price will be 599 for the drives and 15.99 for the re-writable discs."

Not a bad deal for 4.7 gigabytes worth of storage per disc. About the market for the devices, Roby says...

"What we expect initially is video enthusiasts... people that want to work with their video, create video and transfer their family videos to DVD. So initially, we think the video enthusiasts and people that have actually been working with video will pick it up and then as word gets out, we expect it to go toward more novice video consumers that just want to preserve their precious memories."

With the right hardware on your PC to capture video... you could record directly onto DVD from your camcorder. Dell is planning to use the DVD+RW format drives as well. Look for prices to fall and for DVD recordable drives to eventually replace the now popular CD recorders found in many PCs. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.