CeBIT 2002 - The Background Info

DVD Format - Page 3

Of course companies like Panasonic, Toshiba will continue supporting the DVD-RAM format, but it's already known that the DVD-RAM has the worst compatibility among the DVD recording formats with desktop DVD players. Hitachi in the new (and hopefully improved) DVD Camcorder supports both DVD-R/DVD-RAM formats (8cm).

You may don't know but there isn't really any DVD specification for higher than 1x DVD recording format (for DVD-R/RW formats). The increased writing speeds of 4x DVD-R and 2x DVD-RW are now discussed in the DVD Forum and are expected to be finalized until Q3 of 2002.

Another issue is the recordable DVD media. We talked with many DVD-R media manufacturers and so far no one believes that we can have 4x certified DVD-R media by June. They admit that they can manufacture 3x media but the 4x is another story. Mitsui was probably the only manufacturer that promised to support 4x. Pioneer, as a media manufacturer, didn't say anything about 4x DVD-R media, but probably will have something ready by that time.

There were also a lot of taking about the "Blue Ray" technology, which promises even higher capacity with of course different laser diodes and new media. You shouldn't start dreaming of such a system soon at your home, since the most of the companies plan to ship a blue ray drive somewhere around the end of 2003-early 2004. The DVD recording gradually will take its place among the daily use but of course CD writing will also be present.

Toshiba was the only company that presented an alternative to the "Blue Ray" consortium making things even more complicated. So we have a member of DVD Forum (Toshiba) against nine (9) companies that want to promote the "Blue Ray". Even now inside the "Blue Ray" there are three different "formats". We have heard about 23.3GB, 25GB and even 27GB different supported capacities.

Toshiba promises capacities of 30GB with the use of Blue Laser and even up to 110GB with Dual Side/Dual Layer discs. So will this be another confusing issue just like in the DVD format? We hope not. We assume that companies have realized the confusion between users among the DVD recording formats and will try to co-ordinate at only ONE format.

Even if the "Blue Ray" format promises such a high capacities, for now there aren't any thoughts for PC (Data) use. The main propose will be the HDTV applications, which are also promised from time to time. There will be a lot of talk about copy protection (like what happened with DVD format) and this time probably would be higher secured. Also, the cost of the blue laser drives is much higher than the CD and DVD recorders even up to 1000% times. This means that a Blue Laser recorder will cost like 50.000$, when a DVD recorder costs 600$. Different optics, different media, do make the difference.

Multi-Level (ML) recording technology from Calimetrics is also an interesting issue. Without any doubt this technology can shift up the media capacity levels without major differences in changing the lasers and the whole system design. Most of the people we talked about ML, came up with the same conclusion "Multi-Level is a great idea for the DVD format".