HD DVD Seminar

On 11th of March 2005, the DVD Forum held a HD DVD Press seminar to inform press journalists about the current status of HD DVD and of course, answer several quite interesting questions...

The main speakers were from NEC, Toshiba, Sanyo and Memory Tech:

Below you can see each of the above mentioned persons:

In a pre-recorded message, the president of Warner Bros Studios and Home Video, James Cardwell, announced that Warner Bros, Paramount and Universal plan to immediately release over 50 HD DVD titles of new and old movies, such as Troy, The Polar Express, Harry Potter and The Matrix trilogy!

Mr Y. Tsuchiya from Sanyo Electric Co. LTD explained why Sanyo believes that HD DVD is a better and more cost effective solution than Blu-Ray. Sanyo will be able to provide HD DVD pickups to all hardware manufacturers who wish to make HD DVD recorders. A three-format compatible playback pick-up system, using a single optical pickup unit has already been achieved, making it possible to create slim-line drives for laptops too.

Mr Otsuka's speech from Memory-Tech, was mostly about the manufacturing process of HD DVD and the reduced cost. According to Mr. Otsuka, Memory Tech had 6 production lines installed in 2004 and 4 more in 2005. The 2.8 seconds for HD DVD Dual production cycle, 92~94% yield, achieved (20% cycle improvement since May 2004), while 2.6 second production cycle will be achieved by May 2005. Mr. Otsuka's presentation included a very interesting video from a HD DVD-ROM manufacturing process, where it was shown that at the press of a button, the entire production of HD DVD could be switched to DVD and via versa...

By June 2005, Memory Tech said that it will improve and stabilize the manufacturing process for the mass production of HD DVD media. Collaborating with leading replication machine vendors like Sumitomo, Origin, Singules and Hitachi, will enable the implementation of the HD DVD process in DVD replication machines. Further information can be found at this webpage.

In the press kit that was given to all journalists, included was a HD DVD-ROM disc, which was compatible with our NEC ND-6500A drive, demonstrating the history, benefits, manufacturing process and general information about the HD DVD format.

Concluding, according to the speech, the advantages of HD DVD are:

• Low media cost, compared with DVD format
• Backwards compatibility with CD/DVD formats
• The format would be there at the announced time (see working PC HD DVD-ROM drive at NEC's booth..)