DVD: A Solution to the Secondary Storage Glut ... Someday
onlineinc.com
DVD has been much in the news lately, but has so far delivered little as a storage or distribution medium for non-consumer-specific applications. A DVD disc is the same physical size as a CD-ROM, but incorporates more pits and lands by making them smaller and closer together, allowing for a capacity of up to 17GB on a double-sided, dual-layer disc. Unlike CD-ROM, which was based on a medium originally designed to play audio, DVD was designed from the ground up with audio, video, and computer applications in mind. Thus, there will be several types of DVD available. DVD-ROM, DVD-R, and DVD-RAM are the most applicable to the computer user, DVD-ROM being the equivalent of pressed CD-ROM and DVD-R the slightly-less-capacious-than-DVD-ROM recordable version. DVD-RAM, accepted standard for rewritable high-density CD, has been announced by several companies and samples are expected to be shipping in August 1997, with production models due by the end of the year.
DVD-ROM drives are now available from several vendors, with or without the DVD-Video-associated MPEG-2 encoding card. Pricing is reasonable; the Creative Labs PC-DVD upgrade kit which includes a Panasonic DVD-ROM drive and an MPEG-2 decoder board, was released at $499, and a significant price drop and improved model became available in third quarter 1997 for a $379 list price. DVD-R drives should be available in the third or fourth quarter of 1997, but cost will be considerably higher than current CD-R drives, as Pioneer has announced their DVD-R drive at $17,000, up from the initial projected $11,000. DVD-RAM drives, by contrast, will be considerably cheaper; Hitachi has announced prices as low as $768 for its internal ATAPI DVD-RAM drive. The price disparity between DVD-R and DVD-RAM drives is apparently a function of development costs for the respective technologies and the perceived market for each drive type. DVD-RAM uses phase change technology, like PD and CD-RW. Since the phase change technology was already developed, the jump from CD-RW to DVD-RAM (RW) was not as great as that required to develop a DVD-R media (deep pink in color on the recording side) with an appropriate dye formulation for high density recording. |
