If you've got a bunch of old VHS or old camcorder tapes sitting around, chances are they don't get much use. What with DVD having kicked older formats butts soundly to the curb a few years ago, who wants to deal with rewinding and fast forwarding and all that jazz? Perhaps it's time to covert those dusty tapes into shiny DVD format. You can do it by digitizing your footage onto your computer and then burning it, but that takes forever and is a pain.

Sony doesn't want you do toil over such mundane tasks. That's why they've released the Sony DVDirect VRD-MC3, a little drive that'll hook up to basically anything and spit DVDs out with no hassle. You can connect you camcorder, VCR, computer — you name it, and it'll burn it to any format of blank DVD without you having to learn how to edit video in the process. Where has this thing been? You'd think that a solution this simple would have come out a while ago. Oh well, at least it's here now. — Adam Frucci

Via NY Times