Sony's PC-less DVD burner

Just like those standalone, PC-less CD burners out there, Sony's new
$300 DVDirect can convert your camcorder or VCR tapes directly to DVD, stuffing up to twelve hours of video at the lowest quality setting onto a single dual-layer disc, encoding footage in MPEG-2 format while automatically creating chapter stops. It burns at 16x speed for single-layer DVD+R, or 2.4x speed for dual-layer discs, with buffer underrun support so you won't have any wasted blanks, and can hook up to a PC via USB 2.0 if you want to swing that way. We're impressed that this $300 unit can stuff up to twelve hours of video at the lowest quality setting on a single dual-layer disc.