Moments after Pioneer's announcement that they had "begun shipping one of the fastest DVD drives on the market," Sony come along with "a new DVD kit featuring the fastest DVD drive on the market."

Sony's kit, which will be available this summer, includes a 5X DVD-ROM drive, a plug-in circuit board based on MPEG video technology for playing video titles, and two DVD-ROM titles for $349. The Sony DVD drive accesses data from CD-ROM discs in 75 milliseconds, and DVD discs in 100 milliseconds.

Whereas, Pioneer's DVD-102 is 2.6 times as fast as first- generation DVD-ROMs. The drive offers an average seek time of 120 milliseconds, and access time of less than 150 milliseconds for DVD-ROM discs and will cost $175.

The new news is that in late April, Pioneer will begin shipping the Mac-compatible SCSI DVD-302 for $275.

(Source: Ninfomania NewsWire)