A DVD-Ram take.........................................................................
Japan leaps into DVD-RAM
By Yoshiko Hara and Terry Costlow
TOKYO -- Hitachi Ltd. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., moving quickly to roll out recordable DVD disk drives, have announced DVD-RAM drives only a week after the DVD-Forum finalized the DVD-RAM Version 0.9 specification.
Hitachi plans to ship samples in June, before the expected July publishing of the final DVD-RAM specification Version 1.0. Matsushita plans to begin sampling this autumn, after the Version 1.0 is finalized.
"The DVD-RAM is the ultimate DVD format, and Hitachi wants to offer it to customers for evaluation as early as possible," said Etsuhiko Shoyama, senior executive managing director of Hitachi.
Observers note that the quick announcement may be more of a marketing strategy than a technical capability.
"The key words here are 'shipping samples,' " said Bob Katzive, vice president at Disk/Trend Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.). "They might be making evaluation units available to OEMs so they can have the inside track once the specification is ready. This is a little surprising, because most people are talking about doing this next year."
Toshiba Corp. is among those taking a wait-and-see attitude. A spokesman said that this summer or fall the company will sample a model based on Version 1.0 that is close to an actual product and have it ready for market introduction by year's end.
Hitachi demonstrated three types of DVD-RAM drives: two built-in models with Atapi (AT Attachment packet Interface) and SCSI-2 respectively, and a standalone type with SCSI-2. The drives use a pickup with two-lasers (650 nm and 780 nm) and two-lenses to support all formats of DVD and CD, including CD-R and CD-RW. Sample prices are $800 for the built-in types and $960 for the standalone type.
Timed to coincide with the first samples of the DVD-RAM drive, Hitachi Maxell Ltd., a media manufacturing subsidiary, will ship a DVD-RAM disk sample, priced at about $80 per disk.
Matsushita announced both a PD- and DVD-compatible drive. Matsushita has been promoting its proprietary PD format, a phase-change writable disk system with 650-Mbyte capacity.
Regardless of the technology used, the DVD-RAM drives will have a capacity of 2.6 Gbytes per surface, compared with 4.7 Gbytes per platter for DVD-ROM disks. On the one hand, that's substantially better than the 650 Mbytes of CD-E, (for erasable drives that have rewriting capability), which are still a fairly low-volume product, though they are seeing swift growth. Disk/Trend predicts that 2.6 million CD-E drives will ship this year, while shipments of conventional read-only CD-ROM drives could hit 66 million. Those figures will rise to 4 million and 85 million by 1999, according to Disk/Trend.
Hitachi projected that the total DVD market will reach 70 million units in the year 2000 worldwide, and DVD-RAM drives will account for about 30 million units. The higher projections for DVD drives is partly because they will be used in home entertainment.
"DVD-RAM drives have all functions that DVD-ROM drives have, adding the recording capability," said Takashi Kubota, general manager of Hitachi's DVD Business Promotion Center. "Like video-cassette recorders largely surpassed video-cassette players, it is natural that the share of DVD-RAM drives will eventually exceed DVD-ROM, though the price of the drive will be the decisive factor."
In the drive market, Hitachi looks to establish a 20-percent share, said Osamu Numata, general manager of Hitachi's Optical Data Storage Systems Operation. Disk/Trend's Katzive isn't predicting any swift takeoff for DVD-RAM drives, in large part because the specification is still evolving. "I don't think they'll take much market share away from CD-E drives. Nobody will commit to a full-scale rampup until everything is set. Frankly, considering the pressure that could be put on by the entertainment industry, the ramp-up everybody's talking about during 1998 could easily slip. The entertainment people are concerned about copyright issues."
But he added that drive makers can't wait too long to get drives out of their factories. "There are other competing technologies out there. The M-7 issue and the SyQuest Rocket drive both have the capacity to do authoring for DVD-ROM disks. That's more than you can say about DVD-RAM, which only has 2.6-Gbyte capacity, while DVD-ROM has 4.7."
While most of the backward-compatibility focus for DVD-RAM drives is for CD-ROM, Matsushita has made its drives compatible with its PD drives. Shunji Ohara, manager at Matsushita Optical Disk Systems Development Center in charge of DVD-RAM development, said, "Roughly speaking, about 1 million PD drives are already installed worldwide. Our customers of personal computer vendors are requesting DVD-RAM should have PD compatibility."
The PD system uses a 780-nm laser for writing and reading. To maintain compatibility with PD disks using a 650-nm laser, Matsushita developed an 8.5-mm-thick compact pickup that has one 650-nm laser and two object lenses, one for DVD and another for PD and CDs--CD-ROM, CD-DA and CD-RW.
Hitachi began sampling a 2x DVD-ROM drive GD-2000 last month, claiming that a 2.76-Mbyte/s transfer rate and average 150-ms access time enable quick data retrieval from the 4.7-Gbyte per platter DVD-ROM disks.
Hitachi developed a dedicated digital signal processor for the double-speed operation. "The 2x drive will be the main product for DVD-ROM," said Kubota of Hitachi. |
