Sony Developing Rival To DVD-Video 05/20/97
It's a ways off, but unfortunatly can be seen as immediately threatening by the street.
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TOKYO, JAPAN, 1997 MAY 20 (NB) -- By Martyn Williams. Sony Corporation [TOKYO:6758] [NYSE:SNE], a leading member of the DVD-Forum, put the cat firmly amongst the pigeons today when it announced it was developing its own home-use re-recordable video system to rival DVD-Video. A company spokesman said Sony is skeptical of DVD's suitability as a re-recordable video format and that it hopes to have its own system on the market by 2000.
The news came in a research and development announcement from the company, detailing its success in storing 12-gigabytes of data on a single-sided 12cm disk, the same size as DVD. The large data storage was accomplished through a combination of new technologies including a blue-green laser, high numerical aperture lens and very thin disk protective layer.
The new laser has a wavelength of 515-nanometers (nm), much shorter than the 650-nm lasers used in DVD products and 780-nm lasers in CD players. This is one reason for the increased data storage ability. A new lens, with numerical aperture of 0.85, also helps because it focuses the beam into a smaller spot on the disk than other lenses. The higher the numerical aperture, the smaller the laser spot and the finer the data can be stored. In contrast, a DVD player uses a lens with value 0.6 and a CD player has a lens with value 0.45.
Finally the disk is constructed so that the recording layer is just 0.1-mm below the surface of the disk, which means the light has less material to travel through before hitting the recording surface. This also means more data can be squeezed onto the disk.
Using the three new technologies, Sony said it had achieved a recording density of 9.5-gigabit per square inch. It said the comparable recording density of DVD is 3.2-gigabit per square inch and 730-megabits per square inch for CD.
"The system is outside of the DVD sphere," conceded a Sony spokesman. He said, "DVD-Video is not recordable. The only DVD format that is, is DVD-RAM and it has a capacity of 2.6-gigabytes. We don't feel that is enough and we don't see future developments that will make it into a home-use system. We are positioning DVD-RAM as a computer product." He said the disks Sony has developed, as they stand now, can store around five hours of NTSC standard video and 1.2-hours of high-definition video.
There are several hurdles to development of the technology into a commercial system, many of them shared with the development of a re-writable DVD-Video system. The blue-green laser in use currently has a life of less than ten hours, said a spokesman. "A life of over 10,000-hours is needed for a commercial product," he added. In 1996, Sony announced development of a read-only laser that had a life of just over 100-hours but the new unit is required to write data, which requires more power, and so the life is lower.
In addition to the laser, a second hurdle lies in the development of a cheap, small real-time MPEG-2 encoder. This is what takes analog video and coverts it to a compressed digital signal for storage on the disk. The spokesman said no decision had been made whether to use MPEG-2 of some other system but did not that Sony recently announced, in another research release, that it had succeeded in making an MPEG-2 encoder on a single chip. The device is expected in sample quantities later this year and commercially in spring 1998. It is expected to cost less than 30,000 yen ($263).
The two same problems are what has prevented the launch of a re-recordable version of DVD-Video so, why not develop the technologies and apply them to the DVD system? The spokesman maintained that the Sony system will have greater capacity than DVD-Video, even with the new laser, and that it will prove a better solution.
For Sony, if the system becomes a success, it will mean a lot more money made in licensing. Currently, as one of ten companies in the DVD-Forum, it receives a portion of fees from DVD hardware and software sales. With its own system, it would receive a larger slice of the licensing cake.
"We are very strong proponents of DVD. This is a complementary format, but because the disk is the same physical format, it would be very easy to make a product that would play both," he added.
The DVD-Forum also includes Hitachi Ltd., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Philips Electronics NV, Pioneer Electronics Corporation, Thomson Multimedia, Time Warner Inc., Toshiba Corporation and Victor Company of Japan Ltd (JVC). The companies all own various patents used in DVD technology.
No official comment was available from the DVD-Forum. At the time Newsbytes called, officials said they were unaware of the Sony announcement.
Exchange rate: $1 = 114.00 yen
(19970520/Reported By Newsbytes News Network: newsbytes.com /SONYDOTSLOGO/PHOTO)
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