Diamond and Creative Labs duke it out over DVD by Michael Brown
June 20, 1997, 5 p.m. PT
Creative Labs rained all over Diamond Multimedia's first DVD-ROM drive kit announcement by announcing its second kit--the PC-DVD Encore DXR2--at the amazing price of $379.99. Priced at $599, Diamond's Maximum DVD kit is a whopping $220 higher. More importantly, Diamond's drive doesn't support all the features that Creative's product does--or will; Creative doesn't plan to ship its drive until september.
On the surface, the Creative and Diamond products look very similar. Both kits include a DVD-ROM drive, both offer composite and S-video output (Creative's first product didn't), both deliver Dolby AC3 audio, both cards are outfitted with MacroVision copy-protection decoders, and both companies offer a software bundle that includes games. Here's a breakdown of the differences:
MPEG-2 video quality: Viewed on an RGB monitor, the video quality from
Creative's card was poor, with lots of chunky-looking pixels. Creative, which is using a C-Cube chipset for MPEG-2 decoding, couldn't demonstrate the quality of its NTSC output because it had damaged the only video cable it brought to the show. (The card has a proprietary connector on its mounting bracket and a proprietary cable with RCA and S-video ends.)
Video quality on Diamond's product, which uses a Zoran MPEG-2 decoder chipset( Zoran?), was considerably better, with little pixelization when viewed on both RGB and S-video monitors. Diamond's card has standard composite and S-video outputs on its mounting bracket.
CD-ROM mode: Creative is the clear winner on this score: Its drive delivers CD-ROM data at up to 24X; Diamond's delivers only 8X performance. Creative's drive will also read CD-R discs. Diamond's can't.
Audio: Both kits feature S/PDIF outputs, so you can take digital Dolby AC3 audio out to an external AC3 decoder. Diamond's product also supports Dolby Pro Logic.
By pre-announcing a product this far in advance, Creative could freeze the DVD-ROM drive market. After all, who wants to buy a product now when a much better product is right around the corner? If Creative misses its September ship date, however, its strategy could backfire. Creative is also at risk of alienating its own customer base by announcing such a superior product so soon after shipping its first DVD-ROM drive. For Diamond, the stakes are even higher: it could end up with a product that nobody wants.
Also on the DVD-ROM front, IBM was showing its first Aptiva to include a built-in DVD-ROM drive. The Aptiva C3D, which should appear on retail shelves in early July, will feature a 233-MHz Pentium MMX, 32MB of RAM, a 4.2GB hard disk, and ATI's Rage II 3D accelerator. List price is $2,899. |
