Holiday Buying Guide for Digital Photography Lovers:
Blank DVDs

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Since most computers now ship with a DVD burner, a pack of blank DVDs is useful to almost everyone, particularly those with many large photos. DVD backups and photo originals are a good match because you want to preserve a copy of your photo in its original form so that quality degration is not an issue after use. For example, if you resize an original and save it, you have lost much of the detail of the original if you need a different size in the future. In this case, you want to resize the original to a new file.

This can become costly when it comes to hard drive space. DVDs are a low-cost solution to this problem, and have a decent shelf-life.

It is recommended that every five years you back up your burned DVDs, at least those with important data on them, but certainly not as often as was the case with magnetic media.

When buying blank DVDs, look at what your consumer electronics support. If your home DVD player supports DVD-R and DVD+R it might not matter at all which you get. Typically, more electronics support DVD-R, so I recommend that. You'll pay a little less than $1 per disk retail.

Approximate Cost: $25 for 25-50 DVDs