also handle CD-R and CD-RW media; in fact, a number of standalone DVD recorders use drives designed for computers. More recently, manufacturers have begun to phase out DVD drives from laptop computers in favor of portability and digital media. Most internal drives are designed with SATA interfaces, with parallel ATA becoming increasingly rare. External drives often use the USB standard for connectivity. DVD recorder drives manufactured since January 2000 are required by the DVD consortium to respect DVD region codes when reading a disc. The drives are incapable of assigning region codes when writing a disc as this is stored on a part of the disc to which PC based and standalone video recorders do not have write access. DVD duplication systems are generally built out of stacks of drives, connected through a computer-based backplane. Standalone DVD recorders When the standalone DVD recorder first appeared on the Japanese consumer market in 1999, early units were very expensive, costing between $2500 and $4000 USD. More recently, DVD recorders from notable brands have dropped in price. Early units supported only DVD-RAM and DVD-R discs, but newer units can record to DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R DL and DVD+R DL. Certain models include mechanical hard disk drive-based digital video recorders (DVRs) to improve ease of use. Standalone DVD recorders generally have basic DVD authoring software built in. In 2009, Panasonic introduced the world's first Blu-ray disc recorder which was capable of recording both DVDs and Blu-ray discs and featured built in satellite HDTV tuners. A year later, Panasonic introduced Blu-ray disc recorders with terrestrial HDTV tuners. DVD recorders have technical advantages over VCRs, including: Superior video and audio quality Easy-to-handle smaller form-factor disc media, and higher durability compared to magnetic tape Random access to video chapters without rewinding or fast-forwarding (serial access) Onscreen multilingual subtitles and labeling not available on VCRs Reduced playback wear and tear High-quality digital copying, with little or no generational quality loss Improved editing on rewritable media Playlisting No risk of accidentally recording over existing content or unexpectedly running out of space during recording Easily accessible recordings as a result of chapter menus Note: Blu-ray disc recorders can record full high definition videos on BD-Rs and BD-REs. Disadvantages include: Slow initial access/load times due to the optical nature of the disc Limited rewritability on DVD-RW/+RW discs (typically around 1000). DVD-RAM is better suited for high frequency re-recording (around 100,000