RichN
Stunt Coordinator
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2002
- Messages
- 72
Anyone read this article, and does it mean that current disks won't work on the new players? I'm NOT replacing all my current DVDs with "blue-ray" disks.
"TOKYO (Reuters) - Rivalry among industry titans over
next-generation DVDs heated up on Monday when Japan's Toshiba and NEC said they would propose a cheaper type of high-capacity disc incompatible with a format advanced by Sony and others. Toshiba said its format for blue-laser DVDs, set to hit the market next year and able to store huge volumes of data thanks to blue light's short wavelength, was more compatible with existing red-laser DVDs and would smooth the transition from red to blue.
"From the consumer's side, when a new type of player comes
out, they still want to be able to watch the DVDs they already own," said Toshiba spokeswoman Midori Suzuki.
"From the manufacturer's side, with our format they can use
many of the same facilities they use to make existing DVDs, so costs are much lower." Despite such arguments for cost and convenience, the format
would be incompatible with the Blu-ray standard for blue-laser DVDs unveiled in February by Sony Corp, Panasonic brand maker Matsushita Electric Industrial Co and seven other electronics giants from Japan, South Korea and Europe.
The world's DVD equipment makers have already been hurt by
a fragmentation of formats for red-laser DVD recorders, blamed for hindering the take-off of that market.
Although DVD recorder sales have been strong in recent
months, several industry executives have urged that blue-laser players and recorders avoid the mistakes of their red-laser predecessors.
NEXT STEP
Toshiba's Suzuki played down concerns about a format war,
saying Blu-ray may be a logical next step in the longer term
and Toshiba was still doing development work on that format.
"In the future, these two would not necessarily be
competing standards," she said. "We don't have any concrete scenario, but we are working on development (of Blu-ray), and that will be the easier technology to implement as storage capacity needs increase." The Blu-ray format offers at least 23.3 gigabytes of storage on a single side of a disc, enough for a two-hour movie in the high-definition format, compared with Toshiba's 15-20 gigabytes.
Red-laser DVDs typically hold about 4.7 gigabytes. But the Blu-ray DVDs will require greater capital investment by manufacturers and will feature protective cartridges and other quirks that may make compatibility with existing products costly and difficult. Suzuki said technological advances, including image compression techniques and using semi-transparent materials to record two layers of data on a single disc side, meant that 15-20 gigabytes would initially be enough for recording high-definition motion pictures. She added Toshiba and NEC were hoping to make a formal decision this week on submitting their format to the DVD Forum, an industry group of more than 230 companies that defines DVD format specifications and aims to promote DVD use. Toshiba, Japan's biggest chipmaker and a major player in DVD equipment, was one of the few Japanese electronics giants not to join the Blu-ray consortium.
A Sony spokeswoman said her company's commitment to Blu-ray
was unchanged and she declined to comment on whether the
Toshiba-NEC format would pose a threat to acceptance of Blu-ray as an industry standard. The other members of the Blu-ray consortium are Japan's Hitachi Ltd, Pioneer Corp and Sharp Corp, South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and LG Electronics Inc, Philips Electronics NV of the Netherlands and France's Thomson Multimedia."
RichN
"TOKYO (Reuters) - Rivalry among industry titans over
next-generation DVDs heated up on Monday when Japan's Toshiba and NEC said they would propose a cheaper type of high-capacity disc incompatible with a format advanced by Sony and others. Toshiba said its format for blue-laser DVDs, set to hit the market next year and able to store huge volumes of data thanks to blue light's short wavelength, was more compatible with existing red-laser DVDs and would smooth the transition from red to blue.
"From the consumer's side, when a new type of player comes
out, they still want to be able to watch the DVDs they already own," said Toshiba spokeswoman Midori Suzuki.
"From the manufacturer's side, with our format they can use
many of the same facilities they use to make existing DVDs, so costs are much lower." Despite such arguments for cost and convenience, the format
would be incompatible with the Blu-ray standard for blue-laser DVDs unveiled in February by Sony Corp, Panasonic brand maker Matsushita Electric Industrial Co and seven other electronics giants from Japan, South Korea and Europe.
The world's DVD equipment makers have already been hurt by
a fragmentation of formats for red-laser DVD recorders, blamed for hindering the take-off of that market.
Although DVD recorder sales have been strong in recent
months, several industry executives have urged that blue-laser players and recorders avoid the mistakes of their red-laser predecessors.
NEXT STEP
Toshiba's Suzuki played down concerns about a format war,
saying Blu-ray may be a logical next step in the longer term
and Toshiba was still doing development work on that format.
"In the future, these two would not necessarily be
competing standards," she said. "We don't have any concrete scenario, but we are working on development (of Blu-ray), and that will be the easier technology to implement as storage capacity needs increase." The Blu-ray format offers at least 23.3 gigabytes of storage on a single side of a disc, enough for a two-hour movie in the high-definition format, compared with Toshiba's 15-20 gigabytes.
Red-laser DVDs typically hold about 4.7 gigabytes. But the Blu-ray DVDs will require greater capital investment by manufacturers and will feature protective cartridges and other quirks that may make compatibility with existing products costly and difficult. Suzuki said technological advances, including image compression techniques and using semi-transparent materials to record two layers of data on a single disc side, meant that 15-20 gigabytes would initially be enough for recording high-definition motion pictures. She added Toshiba and NEC were hoping to make a formal decision this week on submitting their format to the DVD Forum, an industry group of more than 230 companies that defines DVD format specifications and aims to promote DVD use. Toshiba, Japan's biggest chipmaker and a major player in DVD equipment, was one of the few Japanese electronics giants not to join the Blu-ray consortium.
A Sony spokeswoman said her company's commitment to Blu-ray
was unchanged and she declined to comment on whether the
Toshiba-NEC format would pose a threat to acceptance of Blu-ray as an industry standard. The other members of the Blu-ray consortium are Japan's Hitachi Ltd, Pioneer Corp and Sharp Corp, South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and LG Electronics Inc, Philips Electronics NV of the Netherlands and France's Thomson Multimedia."
RichN
