The seven promotors of the rewritable "DVD+RW" optical disk, Hewlett-Packard, Mitsubishi Chemical, Ricoh, Royal Philips Electronics, Sony, Thomson Multimedia and Yamaha, presented their product roadmaps and strategies on the the "DVD+RW Seminar" in Tokyo:
Royal Philips Electronics plans to introduce its DVD+RW recorder on the market between summer and fall of 2001. Initially, the company will target the U.S. and European markets where there are already many users of Philips products, with plans for expansion into the Japanese market in 2002. The price of the DVD+RW recorder will be between US$2,000 and US$2,500. |
At the DVD+RW Seminar in Tokyo, Royal Philips offered a demonstration of recording and replaying using a test machine. The test machine is almost the same as the one exhibited at "2001 International CES" held in Las Vegas from January 6 to 9, except for the newly added IEEE1394 terminal for connecting a digital video camcorder. Royal Philips will market two types of recording media: one with a single-platter capacity of 4.7GB and the other with a double-platter capacity of 9.4GB. The price will be close to that of a DVD-RW disk or a DVD-RAM disk.
Ricoh, on the other hand, exhibited its DVD+RW appliance for installation in a personal computer. This appliance will be commercialized in the third quarter of 2001. Sony too plans to commercialize a similar appliance between the end of 2001 and early 2002. The price of Sony's DVD+RW appliance will be similar to that of a DVD-RAM appliance or maybe a little higher. As for the DVD+RW appliance command set, which is one of the reasons for delayed commercialization, the MMC meeting of T10 is discussing it for standardization in the near future. T10 is a technical committee to promote standardization of the SCSI standard.
The DVD+RW disk is almost the same as the current DVD-Video disk or the DVD-ROM disk in terms of physical format and logic format.
Source: Nikkeibp.co.jp
