Toshiba, NEC pick format fight with Blu-ray cabal
Toshiba, NEC pick format fight with Blu-ray cabal
Toshiba and NEC have started a standards war in the race to produce an heir for DVD in optical disc technology, by proposing a new format to compete with the existing Blu-ray consortium.
The two Japanese companies have the task of battling the proponents of the Blu-ray format, proposed back in February Sony, Hitachi, Pioneer, Matsushita, Royal Philips, Samsung, LG, Sharp and Thomson Multimedia.
Toshiba and NEC said they would will submit their standard to the DVD Forum, a standards body with 200 members in the industry. The Forum's Steering Committee responded to the move by forming two working groups to "study differing technical approaches to developing the next-generation Blue Laser DVD format".
The Toshiba/NEC format will have a 40 gigabyte capacity per disc, compared to 50GB for the Blu-ray disc, but discs for the new format will be cheaper to produce, according to the two companies. The Blu-Ray standard specifies a cover thickness of 0.6mmm, whereas the Toshiba/NEC discs only have a covering of 0.1mm.
The major difference with the DVD specification is in the wavelength of the laser used to read data, which for DVDs is in the red part of the spectrum, and for both new formats is blue. Both new formats will incorporate a disc with 12cm diameter, the same size as existing CDs and DVDs.
The storage industry is certainly no stranger to format conflicts, and it seems that users of high-end disc storage products will have to choose which side to support, as they did between the competing DVD-RAM and DVD-RW formats. David Wickert, managing director of Australian optical disc media distributor Prodisc, said that as meeting consumer demand was a big issue for disc manufacturers, the attitudes of major film studios in Hollywood would have a negative influence on the new formats.
"Hollywood has a huge interest in DVD. Their returns are significant from that now. I can hardly see them supporting this new format," he said. "There are already a plethora of options [in disc formats]. The cynical response from the consumer would be to wait and see. That is what almost killed DVD."
Mr Wickert said the key issues affecting the adoption of the new standard would be backwards compatibility of the drive with legacy disc formats, along with the rapidity of adoption of DVD.
"It was never the technology that was the problem. It was getting wholesale support from the drive manufacturers and media manufacturers. They're not going to go with these new formats unless they know consumers can adopt them," he said.
"I don't think [the vendors] are timing the presentation of this new format at all well. The consumer has to be given time to settle with the concept of recording to DVDs first."