The company VinPower Digital has announced the Optiarc 5290S DVD burner with DVD+R DL overburn feature. The company, mainly into the professional duplicator business, claims to be resurrecting the Optiarc brand. Optiarc was a joint venture of Sony and NEC that manufactured optical disc drives until 2013.
In a post (in Japanese) on the VinPower website, the company explains the situation (translated with Google), "COMPUTEX made it clear that Sony Optiarc will be fully resurrected with the "Optiarc" brand this time. It's Vinpower Digital, which manufactures and develops optical drive duplicators for business use. By the way, the company is also in charge of manufacturing some Plextor brand optical drives. Originally the company developed an optical drive jointly with Sony and was in charge of the production of some models. After withdrawing from Sony, we continued talking with Sony to make use of the assets we cultivated, and finally we began to release optical drives using the Optiarc brand this year (2017)."
The claim about the Plextor drive manufacturing is backed up by this page on the Plextor website that states that its PX891-SAF is offered exclusively through VinPower Digital.
It appears that the first model that comes out after resurrecting the Optiarc brand, will be the 5290S PLUS, which features DVD+R DL overburning. It's possible the drive uses Optiarc manufactured pickup heads, as Optiarc announced it would continue to make these for consumer electronic products (such as DVD and Blu-ray players/recorders). The overburning feature makes it possible to add up to 200MB to a 8.5 DVD+R dual layer disc.
On the Optiarc 5290S PLUS VinPower writes on its website, "Vinpower originally patented the unique DVD+R DL overburn feature a few years ago, at which point we worked with the Sony Optiarc team to implement that feature in the market leading Sony Optiarc 5280S-CB model. That feature became a big seller globally and created a huge demand. Eventually that model became End Of Life (EOL) and we thought the special DVD+R DL overburn feature would be a thing of the past. Fortunately, through Vinpower’s hard work and collaboration, we were able to bring back the Optiarc drive with the 5290S series and reintroduce the incredible DVD+R DL overburn feature on the PLUS model."
The 5290S PLUS is currently available on Amazon at $34.95. We couldn't find the Plextor PX891-SAF for sale anywhere, it appears to be out of stock everywhere.
