November 18, 2003

Yet another DVD 'standard'

from AP/Excite news bq. Seeking to compete on its own terms in the lucrative entertainment industry, China announced a government-funded project Tuesday to promote an alternative to DVDs and "attack the market share" of the global video format. bq. The rollout of the long-planned project, known as EVD, or enhanced versatile disc, was timed to coincide with the beginning of what China calls the "golden sales" period - known elsewhere as the Christmas shopping season. bq. EVD would give Chinese manufacturers and technology consortiums a homegrown platform to sell and build on. It also is aimed at relieving Chinese DVD producers from paying licensing fees to the companies that hold patents to the DVD format. Yeah - just what we need, another standard... There is one coming out called Blu-Ray that looks really good - it uses the shorter wavelength of a blue laser to pack more data onto a disk very similar to DVD - this gives 27GB storage on a disk (about 13 hours of standard TV and 2+ hours of HDTV) Blu-Ray is currently supported by Hitachi, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, and Thomson and Sony has already announced a Pro-sumer grade recorder for under $4K (DVD recorders first hit the Pro-sumer market at $10K) Hello China??? Anybody listening over there??? Posted by DaveH at November 18, 2003 4:04 PM