Sony unveils new Blu-ray recorders to fight HD DVD
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Sony Corp (6758.T) said it will launch  four models of new Blu-ray high-definition optical disc  recorders in November in Japan, as its format battle with the  HD DVD camp heats up.
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The Blu-ray format has gained the upper hand in the battle for next-generation DVD supremacy, Japanese press said Sunday, after Warner Bros. said it would only support the technology developed by Sony.
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(InfoWorld) - Dell Inc. added Blu-ray disc capability to its notebook PC line on Monday, making an effort to compete withÂ Sony Corp.Â andÂ Toshiba Corp. in the growing market for mobile high-definition video platforms. In addition to showing high-end movies and games, Dell's XPS M1710 notebook could serve as a central node to support digital entertainment throughout the home, the company said. Customers can save 50G bytes of either data or video on a single Blu-ray disc. The ability to read and write data to the discs differentiates Blu-ray from HD-DVD, the competing standard for high-definition video, analysts said. Laptops with HD-DVD capability have lower prices but cannot save data to the discs, said Samir Bhavnani, research director at Current Analysis Inc. "You are starting to see the different camps emerge within the computing companies, with Toshiba and Acer on the HD-DVD side and Sony and Dell on the Blu-ray side," he said. Sony's Vaio VGN-AR270 uses Blu-ray discs, while Acer Co. Ltd.'s notebook and Toshiba's Qosmio G35-AV650 use HD-DVD. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are improvements over standard DVD optical discs; they hold more data and let users watch high-definition video. All three techniques are optical discs, storing data in a binary form that is read by a scanning laser. But a Blu-ray disc can hold five times the capacity of a dual-layer DVD, Dell said. Movie studios and video game producers are eager to sell films on the new media, but the flow of new titles is only a trickle so far because content providers and hardware vendors can't decide which standard will prevail. Pricing starts at US$3,699 for the XPS M1710, including an Intel Corp. Core 2 Duo processor with 4G bytes of memory and up to 160G bytes of storage on a serial ATA hard drive.
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Sony and other technology companies working to launch the next generation of DVD format, Blu-ray Disc, are planning to develop a smaller (8cm) version of the disc, Sony have said.
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Today, Panasonic revealed the new models of DIGA DVD recorders. These recorders have HDD capacities of 160GB to 400GB. This is massive storage space for DVD Recorder; it also has high-speed dubbing, and superb home and mobile networking capabilities.
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(InfoWorld) - It's an interesting contrast: consumers are fast ditching videotape for DVDs and hard disks, but the people who make TV shows are sticking to tape for some cutting edge applications. When it comes to recording broadcast-quality HDTV, today's optical disc systems just can't spin fast enough to keep up with the video -- but that may be about to change. Current optical disc systems are speed-capped at about 10,000 rpm (revolutions per minute.) Spin them any faster and there's a danger the discs will physically disintegrate in the drive leaving nothing but a pile of sharp plastic splinters and data that is gone forever. And even if they don't break apart the disc can begin to wobble making reliable recording a problem. Engineers at the Science and Technical Research Laboratories (STRL) of Japan's public broadcaster, NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai), are working on an optical disc recording system based on consumer Blu-ray Disc technology that can spin as fast as 15,000 rpm without these problems and demonstrated it last week. It's needed because broadcast quality HDTV signals of the type NHK records stream at 250MbpsÂ making a fast-spinning optical disc a necessity. A 1X Blu-ray Disc records at 36Mbps so the new system is equivalent to 7X speed. NHK has gotten around the stress problem by making a flexible disc that is just 0.1 millimeters thick. The disc, which was co-developed with Ricoh, is essentially the recording layer from a Blu-ray Disc without the 1.1 millimeter plastic substrate that is used to give the disc rigidity. It won't break apart at higher speeds but is not rigid enough to be useful in a drive at any speed. To solve this second problem a thick stabilizing plate has been added into the drive. When spun, the disc is kept steady by the stabilizer and can be used up to 15,000 rpm, said Daiichi Koide, an engineer at NHK STRL. The set-up is similar to Hitachi Maxell's Stacked Volumetric Optical Disc (SVOD) that wasÂ introduced in prototype formÂ at last year's Ceatec exhibition in Japan and shown again at Cebit in Germany this year. SVOD packs several 0.1 millimeter thick optical discs into a cartridge and holds them against a stabilizer in the drive to keep them steady while in use. However there is a key difference between the two, said Koide. In the NHK drive the stabilizer doesn't rotate. If it did it would be susceptible to the same stresses that as the discs. The result is that NHK can spin the disc up to 15,000 rpm without any mechanical problems. The system is still under development and there's no word on when it will literally be ready for prime time. NHK envisages cartridges stuffed with a number of the thin discs that can replace videotapes. Â
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Sony Corp. said Monday it is bringing out a cheaper player for Blu-ray discs early this summer, a crucial step in its battle to make the high-definition format the replacement for DVDs.
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PC Magazine - While there's no clear winner in the battle between HD DVD and Blu-Ray, Thursday's introduction of the first set-top Blu-ray recorder from Sharp makes the fight a little more even.
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Sharp&#39;s new recorder has a dual Blu-ray disc/DVD tray to allow digital dubbing in six directional combinations to and from the hard drive, Blu-ray discs, and DVDs, including the ability to dub five DVDs (4.7 GB) onto a single Blu-ray disc (25 GB).
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Sharp Corp (6753.T) said it would launch  a Blu-ray high-definition DVD recorder with a 1-terabyte hard  disk drive (HDD), the world&#39;s largest storage capacity on any  Blu-ray recorder, as it competes with the HD DVD camp.
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InfoWorld - The high-definition movie disc battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc can be traced all the way back to 2000, when companies began experimenting with using new blue lasers in optical disc systems.
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Sony Corp  said it will launch  four models of new Blu-ray high-definition optical disc  recorders in November in Japan, as its format battle with the  HD DVD camp heats up.
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Sony has finally posted a patch for the CyberLink PowerDVD playback software it bundles with its internal Blu-ray Disc burner, the BWU-100A, to allow the drive to play pre-recorded BD media. Sony announced the drive in Europe in September. A month later it promised a BD playback update.â¦
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Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial  Co. (6752.T) said on Wednesday it would launch two Blu-ray DVD  recorders in Japan on November 15, heating up a format battle  for next generation DVD technologies.
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Pre-recorded BDs? No problem Panasonic is gearing up to launch what it claims are the world's first Blu-ray Disc recorders capable of playing back pre-recorded BDs. The units - the Diga DMR-BW200 and DMR-BR100 - can burn content from their built-in hard drives to BD-R/RE discs at 4x speed, the company claimed.â¦
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Electronics companies are at war over next-generation DVDs
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The new models, capable of storing up to 16 hours of high-definition programmes on a dual-layer, 50GB Blu-ray disc, will go on sale on November 8.