Joel, Because I know you won't do any credible DVD research, here's something from your friends at Hitachi.
New DVD-RAM spec spurs Hitachi drives
Received: May 13, 1997 06:23am EDT From: MacWEEK
From MacWEEK for May 12, 1997 by John Poultney
Just after the key players of the Digital Video Disc coalition set the
specifications for such devices, Hitachi America Ltd. announced at the
end of April the first writable DVD devices.
The 10 joint developers of Digital Video Disc, or DVD, released the
specifications in mid-April; they cover rewritable DVD-RAM as well as
DVD-Recordable devices, which may be written to only once. DVD-RAM
systems will employ a "wobble-land-groove" recording method that uses
both the grooves and the "lands" (the spaces between the grooves) as
spaces to hold data.
Hitachi last week said it will begin shipping in June sample quantities of the GF-1050, an internal DVD-RAM drive, and GF-1055, an external version of the device. These drives, to be based on SCSI-2 interfaces, will use a 650-nanometer laser for DVD functions and a separate 780-nanometer laser for CD-R operations. Both will be encased in a dual-lens head. Specialized chip sets will be included for digital signal processing; a separate board will handle MPEG decoding. ie more costs?
Hitachi said the devices will have 1 Mbyte of RAM cache and average
access times of 200 milliseconds for DVD media and 120 milliseconds for CD-ROMs. They will have sustained data transfer rates of 1.38 Mbytes per second in DVD-RAM mode; 2.76 Mbytes per second in DVD-ROM mode; and 1.20 Mbytes per second, or about 15x, in CD-ROM mode.
Hitachi said the GF-1050 will cost $794; the GF-1055 will list for
$953.
Hitachi America Ltd. of Brisbane, Calif., can be reached at (415)
589-8300 or (800) 448-2244; fax (415) 244-7647; www.hitachi.com.
Sounds like a vertical niche for quite a while, not a mass market revenue producer. |
