Play It Again And Again With Dvd
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday October 20, 1998
TDK Electronics Corp is using advances in phase- changing recording mater- ials to create a 4.7Gb rewriteable DVD that can be played back on DVD-video players and computer DVD-ROM drives.
The firm says it will target the new media for multimedia producers and DVD authoring professionals.
The wide compatibility is a function of the media, says the firm, so hardware upgrades will not be needed to use the disks.
TDK hopes to have the product in retail channels by early next year if industry standards can be firmed up in time.
TDK uses a newly developed recording material dubbed "ReCom" that the firm says will be a critical factor in making DVD-RW rewriteable disks more broadly compatible.
At present, DVD-RAM disks can not be played on DVD-video players or DVD-ROM players.
The new material also will enable an increase in the capacity of today's DVD-RAM disks from 2.6GB to 4.7GB, says TDK.
ReCom is a silver, antimony, tellurium and indium compound that the firm described as being "unique in its ability to form ultra-small, highly precise datamarks in response to very rapid laser pulses".
The material can handle multiple rewrite operations, testing to more than 1,000 successful record/overwrite cycles, the firm said.
TDK makes DVD media products such as 3.95Gb DVD-R, but announced it has succeeded in creating a write-once DVD with 4.7Gb capacity.
The firm also markets single-sided 2.6 Gb DVD-RAM and double-sided 5.2Gb DVD-RAM disks.
Kuni Matsui, TDK's president, said recordable optical media represented the future for many business and entertainment applications. He said that the success of CD-R had "proven beyond a doubt that optical disk-based recording is the way the market will go".
"This year, industry-wide sales of CD-R disks in the US will total some 150 million pieces and should double within three years."
As recordable DVD technology became compatible across several platforms and picked up popularity by home and desktop users, he said, the market would grow even faster. There were, however, still several hurdles facing DVD-RW media, such as protecting the rights of copyright holders and content creators, Matsui said.
TDK: http://www.tdk.com
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald