Up until about a year ago, Sony was trying their best to promote their Atrac codec series, but did not offer MP3 support in its portable audio players. However with poor sales they decided to offer a firmware update to provide MP3 support to some of its digital audio players. Now Sony did something rather unexpected by adding direct MP3 support to its Hi-MD disc format.
Sony launched its Hi-MD format early last year that offers an enhanced capacity of 1GB per disc, add support for uncompressed Linear PCM as well as its high compression to size ratio Atrac3Plus codec. Now they have added native MP3 support as well as a new Hi-MD PHOTO standard using the DCF/EXIF image format. Sony will be launching digital cameras soon that make use of Hi-MD discs as well as offer music playback from the media. According to Sony, the advantage with using Hi-MD media is that their cost is only a fraction of the price of 1GB flash based media.
Sony will launch its MZ-DH10P Walkman digital camera in Japan on March 10th along with various other Hi-MD Walkman products that offer native MP3 support. They expect to launch these products in other regions between spring and summer this year.
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The adoption of MP3 and the introduction of Hi-MD PHOTO enhance the Hi-MD media that is renowned for its combination of high capacity, low cost, extreme durability, and removability, which make it ideal both for archiving and sharing. The new features enable users to access a wider range of music than ever, and allow simultaneous enjoyment of digital images and music. Hi-MD continues to expand the possibilities for the development of innovative products that will cross audio and visual boundaries. See the full press release here. |
As Sony was once the market leader when it came to portable audio with its Walkman, it looks like they are determined to grab the market again by making its MiniDisc format more attractive by supporting MP3, the world's most popular audio codec. It seems like they may be too late now that Apple has grabbed most of the market with its iPod.
From what I see, the Hi-MD format does seem to offer the majority of features one would want from a portable player, including high quality recording and playback with its original Atrac format, MP3 support and changeable discs to avoid running out of space.
On the other hand, it does have several drawbacks. While a MiniDisc is much smaller than a CD, it is still bulky and heavy compared with similar capacity digital audio players. It also does not offer radio support. Finally, while its discs are removable to allow additional storage, a similar sized 40GB HD based MP3 player with recording support holds the equivalent to 40 of these discs. Then again, if one misplaces a portable player full of recordings, they may be far worse off than misplacing a MiniDisc recorder with only the recording that is on its loaded disc.
Source: Sony - Press Releases
Yay!!! Big company that I thought was stuck in its ways finnaly takes a big leap away from its proprietary roots and faces the times that Atrac3 was a failer. Now if they would just add native WMA and ACC, naw that would be to good of a idea and probably boost sales...... Somtimes Jap companys can be so Clue-less, but this just gos to show people that when the japanies CEO lays off the socky and sobers up for a few hours good things can happen
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