DVD-recordable drives...................................
eet.com
DVD rewritable drives battle it out at Comdex
By Rick Merritt
EE Times
(11/15/00, 6:09 p.m. EST)
LAS VEGAS — Battling camps of rewritable DVD drive makers brought their rivalry to Comdex where they lobbed fresh volleys in the war to determine a standard for high-capacity recordable media, an issue that could be decided in the marketplace as early as next year.
On the Comdex show floor, Pioneer New Media Technologies Inc. rolled out a 4.7-Gbyte rewritable DVD drive for PCs based on an extension of the DVD Forum's DVD-Recordable specification, claiming the new drive will appear built into new PCs in the first quarter of next year. Pioneer's so-called DVD-RW drive is unique because it can record CD or DVD disks that can be read on CD or DVD players.
Across town a consortium of drive, media and PC makers vowed to roll out next summer the first products of a competing DVD+RW specification. Like the Pioneer drives, they could record CD and DVD disks and be read by any CD or DVD player. Philips and Ricoh said they would ship the drives for which they showed working prototypes, and Hewlett-Packard said it would build the Ricoh drives into its PCs and sell them as aftermarket products. Sony also pledged support for +RW but hedged on when it would release products.
The DVD+RW spec is not one of the DVD Forum's official specifications, but was developed by members of an ad hoc consortium of vendors.
Spec progress
At another location on the show floor, Matsushita and Hitachi claimed progress in their work on the DVD-RAM standard, the official rewritable specification of the DVD Forum. Panasonic displayed new consumer and computer drives as well as the first software application implementing a new video recording format launched last summer.
Apple Computer is already using DVD-RAM drives in some of its high-end desktops. However, disks created by the drives can only be read or played back in other DVD-RAM drives, not in other kinds of CD or DVD players.
The scramble to set the next-generation standard comes at a time when the demand for standard recordable optical devices seems to be taking off. Vendors report as many as 30 million CD-Recordable drives will be sold this year, and sales next year could be twice as high, according to some estimates.
The surge in CD-R is creating a swell for software companies like Sonic Solutions (Novato, Calif.), which sells a DVD authoring software to both the Pioneer and DVD+RW camps. "This will be like having a video printer, and everyone will want to store family or corporate videos on a disk," said Mark Ely, vice president of strategic planning and business development for Sonic.
"My impression is Pioneer will get to market early and build a real presence with PC OEMs, but the +RW drives will probably catch up in 2002," he said. Sonic has sold 200,000 copies of its DVDIt package with DVD-Recordable drives and hopes to strike bundling deals with users of the new Pioneer and +RW drives.
The competition is expected to rapidly run the new technologies down the cost curve. Although Pioneer said its drive will initially cost $2,000 to end users, one observer said Pioneer and the +RW drive makers will "be very aggressive with pricing" next year to establish their technologies. OEM prices are expected to range from $500 to $700 for the Pioneer and +RW drives. Currently Apple sells its systems with DVD-RAM drives for about $850 more than systems without the drives.
Robert van Eijk, general manager of optical storage in North America for Philips Components, said his company will ship a DVD+RW drive aimed at consumers next summer for less than $3,000. However, he said, prices would come down fast. "We are aiming to drive this into the mass market," he said.
"I would expect to see by 2003 or 2004 rewritable DVD drives that cost as little as $500 to the consumer," said Richard Doherty, principal of consulting firm Envisioneering (Seaford, N.Y.).
Apple uproar
Doherty said he thought Matsushita and Hitachi were "in denial" if they thought consumers would adopt DVD-RAM drives when the disks they create cannot be read in existing DVD-ROM and DVD-Video players, a situation that even has Apple executives in an uproar, he added. "Apple was screaming at Panasonic about when they would have DVD-ROM playback capabilities," Doherty said.
Like Ely, Doherty said he expects Pioneer to take an early market lead with its new drive but that the DVD+RW products would eventually catch up, leaving little ground for DVD-RAM. "No one wants to put a disk in a system and not have it work," he added.
Sony, which helped define the CD standard, attended the +RW event at Comdex as a supporter but scoped out a moderate position. Sony is developing a player for consumers that will support both the Pioneer rewritable and the +RW specifications. The company is also developing a drive for PCs that will support the +RW spec. However, the company did not demonstrate any drives at Comdex and will ship the drives in development "maybe in 2001 or 2002, depending on consumer demand," said Toru Takeda, general manager of technology strategy and development at Sony Corp.
Takeda said Sony believes it's still early to establish a market for the 4.7-Gbyte rewritable DVD drives touted by all the camps. CD-R products are just coming into the mainstream now, he said. He also warned that any drives that did not produce disks that were backward compatible with existing players would be doomed to failure.
"We experimented with magneto-optical drives for years," Takeda said. "We spent a lot of money and learned some hard lessons about compatibility. We can't do that again."
Takeda added that Sony has one consumer drive in a prototype version that could hold up to 22 Gbytes and might be compatible with the +RW spec.
A good road map for high capacity is one of the selling points of the DVD-RAM specification. A spokesman for Hitachi said DVD-RAM will always have more capacity headroom because the format uses a wobbled land and groove structure where it writes data on both the land and groove part of the disk. By contrast the DVD+RW and -RW specs record only on the land portions of the disk.
"We can achieve 15 to 20 Gbytes a side in the foreseeable future, and there is nothing in the path preventing us from getting to 50 to 100 Gbytes per side by 2006," the Hitachi spokesman said.
Takeda of Sony said the type of laser used in the optical pickup, not the land and groove structure, determines the capacity of the drive. He added that the disk cartridge or caddy required by the DVD-RAM spec is part of the reason the disks cannot be read by existing players.
The DVD-RAM group has already shipped about 1 million drives since the first systems were launched in 1998, the Hitachi spokesman said.
For its part, Matsushita is working on software to enable PCs to record DVD-RAM disks that then could be played in DVD-RAM consumer drives. The company is also developing consumer RAM drives that will use a new video recording format the RAM group rolled out last year, said Ted Sugano, manager of the planning group in the DVD-RAM Business Department at Matsushita in Osaka.
JVC, Samsung, Toshiba, LG and the Aopen division of Acer Inc. are also supporting DVD-RAM, he said.
Camera clicks
Hitachi also showed at Comdex a digital video camera that uses an 8-centimeter DVD-RAM disk for storing up to 1.5 Gbytes of still or moving images. The MPEG-2 camera is on sale in Japan now and will be launched in the United States early next year at a price of $2,000.
Takeda of Sony said optical disks will never become the media of choice for mainstream digital still and video cameras because the media is large, costly and power-hungry. At last year's Comdex, Sony rolled out an MPEG-2 camera that used an 8-cm CD-R disk as its media and could connect to the Internet. Such cameras will be restricted to very high end users, Takeda said.
Media prices are still an issue for the new rewritables. CD-R disks now cost as little as 20 cents, Doherty said, while DVD+RW disks will initially cost as much as $20 each.
The market for rewritable drives will grow as the base of DVD players grows, said a spokesman for the DVD+RW camp. In August, 18 percent of all desktop computers and 146 percent of all notebooks shipped with DVD drives, according to PC Data, which tracks and reports on software, hardware and video-game products. As many as 170 million DVD players will have shipped by the end of 2001, according to International Data Corp. |
