Lite-On and HP have announced that Lite-On has become an authorized agent to ship DVD recorders under the HP brand name. Lite-On will take care of the manufacturing and sales of the drives In Europe Middle East and Africa. Altough Lite-On will take care of a lot of things, HP will still have its own influence on the drives.

HP will retain ownership of the product roadmap, go-to-market plan, and customer satisfaction. HP will participate in customer meetings and will test and qualify all optical drive solutions to ensure a high-quality product, and HP will continue to invest in research and development and provide intellectual property for future products. All future products will continue to be protected under the HP brand with HP standards of quality and testing. HP's current portfolio of DVD writer solutions will continue to be managed through HP's traditional processes until their end of life. Lite-On IT will begin the sell-in process for the next generation of DVD writers featuring the new LightScribe technology. The first aftermarket products through the agreement with Lite-On IT will be introduced throughout Europe in March 2005.

This probably means that in the future we no longer have to guess which brand HP is rebadging as the company in the past sold recorders from several other brands under it's own name, it's likely that now all drives will be Lite-On drives with a HP firmware in it. Discuss this in our Recording Hardware Forum. Lite-On also manufacturers drives for the large Japanese electronics giant Sony.

Source: HP