Don't buy a DVD burner until you read PC Authority's definitive guide to the market.

The last year has seen sales of DVD burners rocket, as this once pricey, niche market turned into an affordable, mass market in the space of months. Now, many high-end PCs include a DVD burner – but if you expected a mature, reliable technology, get ready for bad news.

We now have three DVD re-writing formats battling for supremacy: DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM. We discuss their merits and flaws in Performance analysis (see p98), but there's no clear winner across the board.

For instance, if you want a drive for burning DVD movies to play in your standalone player, DVD-R devotees say that it offers the best solution because, they claim, it works with almost all set-top players. Meanwhile, advocates of DVD+R technology claim 94% compatibility. Unfortunately, our experience suggests that the figures for both are closer to 50% to 60%. In short, if you're hoping to burn DVD movies and send them to everyone you know who owns a DVD player or DVD-ROM drive, expect quite a few disappointed phone calls in return.

If you want an archiving tool, DVD-RAM re-writers are more convincing. DVD-RAM has proven reliability and you can write to the discs around 100,000 times – its rivals can only be written to 1,000 times. But DVD-RAM is slow. Panasonic tries to squeeze the best of both worlds into the Multi Drive (see p100), which supports both RAM and -RW, but this has been beset by delays in the manufacturing process. As a result, the US will get the first batch, while we must cross our fingers that it will arrive here soon.

To find out which drives are fastest, and what each technology is best suited for, make sure you read Performance analysis first. And to see which particular drive is right for you, take a look at the full reviews.

Contributors: Tim Dean, Andrew Nathanson and Alyn Sparkes