Here's an interesting article from Gus on another thread. It discusses the future of home recording of High Def TV. A subject I had never considered. In the article, they discuss the obvious choices, but they never mentioned Terastor's NFR technology. It was my understanding that they had mentioned a removeable disk option. Wouldn't it be interesting if this technology could become a replacement for a home VCR?
Apropos this, here's a very interesting article from the 4/8/98 edition of the WSJ...
In HDTV Age, Successor to VCR
Still Seems to Be a Long Way Off
By EVAN RAMSTAD
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
High-definition TV is coming to your living room soon. But good luck
trying to tape it.
This fall, the first high-definition digital television sets are slated to
hit the stores, and TV stations in major markets such as New York,
Chicago and Los Angeles are expected to begin digital broadcasts.
But high-definition VCRs are a long way off. In fact manufacturers
aren't even sure what home-video technology will look like in
television's digital age.
VHS, Beta Replay?
The shift may take place as an upgrade of familiar technology, such
as videocassettes, compact disks or laser disks. But it could easily
get more complicated, perhaps involving something akin to a
computer's magnetic hard-drive. As electronics companies make and
hedge their bets, the results could escalate into a replay of the
standards war between VHS and Beta formats during home-video's
infancy.
For the consumer-electronics industry, guessing right isn't an idle
pursuit. VCRs are present in more than 90% of U.S. households, and
their successor -- or the lack of one -- may turn out to be the
deciding factor in whether consumers accept digital broadcasting.
"People like to record music digitally because it's better sounding,"
says John Briesch, president of audio-video products at Sony
Corp.'s U.S. arm, Sony Electronics Inc. "When they see
high-definition digital TV, they're going to want to do the same
thing in video."
When the nation's TV stations make the shift to digital
broadcasting, not all programs will be high-definition. But those that
are will contain far more picture-data than today's analog devices
-- or even the brand new standard digital ones -- can handle.
One thing working in favor of tape-based technology is that
upgrading analog videocassettes and VCRs for digital use doesn't
seem to pose the same technical challenge as upgrading disks. In
fact, Sony and Hitachi Ltd. are already selling VCRs with digital
capability, although for the most part they won't work for
high-definition pictures.
Betting on Disks
But image quality on tape isn't nearly as good as it is on disk. So for
the long term several manufacturers are betting that technology
based on disks will prevail.
From Japan to Silicon Valley, electronics giants and tiny labs alike
are racing ahead to come up with a high-definition disk, but with
different priorities. Computer firms worry about technical
performance, while consumer-electronics makers are concerned with
affordability. Entertainment companies, meanwhile, fret that any
new disk will work so well and be so cheap that pirates will have a
field day and before long it will undermine security and the market
for theatrical releases.
"You've got three major industries each trying to pull the technology
in their own direction," said Robert Abraham, vice president at
Freeman Associates, a Santa Barbara, Calif., consulting firm that
specializes in data storage.
To record an HDTV broadcast in its entirety, engineers must double
or triple the capacity of existing tapes or disks. Hitachi's digital VCR,
the first VHS-like system in the market, uses a videotape that gets
its capacity boost from being thinner, so more tape can wind around
the spools, and from moving more slowly than ordinary videotape.
But even it won't hold enough to record a high-definition Super Bowl
broadcast.
Sony sells a $4,200 machine that can edit and play back the tiny
cassettes used in the company's digital camcorders. But they can't
handle high-definition pictures. A spokesman says a version with
HDTV capability may soon become available.
JVC Corp. is showing off a prototype high-definition digital
videocassette recorder at trade shows. But the company hasn't set
a production date and won't until at least the middle of the year, a
company spokeswoman said. Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial
Co., meanwhile, is waiting to unveil a digital videocassette recorder
for its Panasonic line until digital copyright issues are resolved, says
Jukka Hamalainen, president of the Panasonic digital-TV lab in
Burlington, N.J. "The recording technology itself is there," he says.
For the long term, however, Matsushita and Sony are placing their
bets on high-definition disks. There is still a long way to go. A
two-hour movie on the digital-video disks now on the market,
known as DVDs, can be stored in approximately five to seven
gigabytes of space. A high-definition movie of the same length
would require from 10 to 17 gigabytes.
Seeing Spots
Here is how digital video disks work: Lasers read small spots, or pits,
as either "on" or "off" commands, and the patterns are translated
electronically into text, sound or video. If smaller spots can be used
on a disk, more information can be packed onto it. One way to
boost disk capacity is with a new "blue" laser, which uses shorter
wavelengths of light and can read smaller spots, which means more
information or data can be stored on the same size disk.
At Sony, for example, engineers have created high-capacity digital
video disks that store up to 12 gigabytes on one side when read by
a blue laser. Under a regular red laser, the same disk's capacity is
eight gigabytes.
But mass-production of blue-laser technology presents uncharted
territory for manufacturers. A Boston University research team
recently announced a method using pieces of polished sapphire and
gallium-nitride crystals that are one-4,000th the width of a human
hair to create the mirrors that would control such a laser.
Calimetrics Inc., an Emeryville, Calif., start-up, designed a process
using existing laser technology to equip disks with pits of eight
different depths instead of just one. Using combinations of depths,
more information can be stored in a given space. Helped by a
federal grant, Calimetrics is working jointly with Polaroid Corp., of
Cambridge, Mass., and Energy Conversion Devices Inc., of Troy,
Mich., to sell the concept to larger electronics makers.
One big hurdle for disks: How will they withstand the abuse that
rented videotapes endure? Already, some store owners complain the
lifespan of a DVD is far shorter than that of a videotape because
the disks bend easily. And when information is being read from
smaller pits, one speck of dust can hide a lot.
Despite the technology logjam, entertainment companies are betting
a solution is at hand. For the past four years, for example, Time
Warner Inc.'s Warner Studios has been filming every episode of such
shows as "E.R." and "Friends" for the wider screen-size of digital TV.
More than 2,000 episodes are ready and waiting to be distributed on
digital home video -- as soon as a lot of people can watch them. |
