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Day 3 - Saturday 12^th March:

Looking forward to a (hopefully) bit less busy day, we headed for the show. Since our first appointment was later on the day, we had some time to look around and visit other companies.

New Medium Enterprises:

We stumbled on a company called New Medium Enterprises, claiming to have 20Gb discs using the technology already available today.

After closer inspection we found out that they achieved 20Gb by adding two more layers to a disc, which means a total of 4 layers. They claim it works with today's technology, but that is only partially true, as the technology requires a new chip for controlling the laser to focus on each layer. They plan to increase capacity all the way up to 40Gb and maybe even 50Gb by simply adding more and more layers to the disc.

Because of the fact that their chipset is under development was there no working drive available, but they have shown us how it works by using a emulation program on their computer . Time will tell if this project becomes popular, if all current readers would have been able to read the discs - then sure, but as long as that is not the case… well, we have our doubts.

Prodisc:

Prodisc showed their HD-DVD-R and HD-DVD-RW discs, shipping time and price is yet to be announced.

Prodisc was promoting Blu-ray by showing a BD-R disc. But they admitted that the disc was not a real BD-R disc. Production of BD-R and BD-RE discs was expected to begin summer 2006 according to the tales man from Prodisc. Price is still not known, but estimated price was close to three times higher than DVD media.

They did also show double layer media for both formats, ready to be shipped, and of course a full line of 16x/8x/4x DVD+/-R, DVD+/-RW and CD-R/RW products.

CMC Magnetics:

We did of course drop by CMC Magnetics, which is one of the larger manufacturers of media. Unfortunately, they did not have any information on HD-DVD or Blu-ray yet.

But they had quite a few discs of various formats and sizes on display. 16x DVD+/-R, 8x DVD+RW, 6x DVD-RW, 5x DVD-RAM and others.

Artec:

We do not have much to say for Artec, this is the most interesting thing we saw, a small sign stating 'DVD Dual, 16x DL". And the drives on each side of the sign are actually just combo drives - not DVD-Writers at all. We were not able to find the specifications so we ran to find someone to tell us about the specifications of the drives.

But the person was not interested in showing us the optical products, only all the other computer products. When we asked him why, he said that Artec did not focus on optical drive anymore due to low profit in the optical drive market.

MAM-E:

Manufacturing Advanced Media Europe has bought the rights to use the Kodak brand name for their media. They will also re-introduce the real Kodak Gold CD-R media.

Kodak DVD Media will be available in both 4x and 8x speed variants.

MAM-E manufactures media of a lot of different types, with a variety of printable surfaces as well.

KiSS Technology:

We had a really long meeting with Kiss and confronted them with some of the questions raised at our forum. Let us start with the Q & A session first.

Q: When will Kiss stop releasing unfinished products?

A: You will in the future see better products released, but there may still be minor issues that need improving by firmware upgrade. And we do admit that our products have not been as good as we wish.

Q: Why do Kiss products not support DVD+R DL discs?

A: We are aware of this issue and hope our engineers could find a solution that we will provide as a firmware upgrade.

Q: When will nero digital be supported by DP-558?

A: It is supported with firmware 1.1.2 which will be released shortly.

Q: Will there be firmware updates available for older players to fix various reported bugs?

A: All players from DP-450 and up will have a new firmware within the middle of May to fix almost every issue reported.

Q: When will the plasma TV's be available? They have been announced for two years already.

A: They will be available in limited quantities from August/September this year using a 6^th generation panel from LG.

Q: Why is the DP-6xx series not released yet?

A: As some of your questions show we have released some unfinished products on the market earlier and will avoid that. Now we focus on getting the product finished before releasing it, we did also redesign the chassis, which took some time as well. But the drive is finally ready for a middle of May release.

Let us take a look at the KiSS DP-600, which is the main focus point of KiSS Technology:

• Plays DVD, WMv9, DivX, MPEG-4, Nero Digital, MP3, Ogg Vorbis and Jpeg pictures.
• Video On Demand: All you need is a PC and an Internet connection and you could pay a small sum to watch Video On Demand videos on the KiSS DP-600.
• Ethernet and wireless connection.
• KiSS Online; listen to radio, play games, watch TV guide or check the weather in your area online.

LG Electronics:

Of course we couldn't forget to visit LG, this is what they had to show us:

The external LG GSA-5167D, 16x DVD+/-R, 8x DVD+RW, 6X DVD-RW, 8x DVD+R DL, 4x DVD-R DL, 5x DVD-RAM as well as 48x CD-R and 32X CD-RW. Add LightScribe and this one looks like a real winner!

The already well known LG GSA-5163D and GSA-4163B: 16x DVD+/-R, 8x DVD+RW, 6X DVD-RW, 4x DVD+R DL, 5x DVD-RAM as well as 40x CD-R and 24X CD-RW.

They also had on display various combo drives and slim drives of course.

DVD-RAM Promotion stand:

We came upon the DVD-RAM promotion stand almost by accident, but used this opportunity to take some images of various drives - all supporting DVD-RAM. Unfortunately - the specifications were lacking for most of them. Anyway, we have some pictures at least.

Panasonic SW-9585, 16x DVD+/-R, 8x DVD+RW, 6x DVD-RW, 5x DVD-RAM as well as DVD+/-R DL. No more information available.

And some more Panasonic drives

Never heard about it, but here is a pixela corporation firewire drive for Macintosh.

Another unknown drive from Buffalo.

And one from I-O Data as well.

Starforce:

For the first time this year we noticed on the exhibitor list Starforce, the famous russian copy protection company, so we decided to pay them a visit :

Safe'n'Sec is Starforce's new IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) for Windows 2000/XP based systems, which intercepts all accesses to the hard drive and compares them to a given set of rules. Any attempt by a program to modify files or windows registry in a suspicious way will be blocked. Although this is not a new idea, the explanations made sense and the demo seemed to work ; more details and a trial version are available on their website.

Starforce is most well known for its "Professional 3.0" copy protection system, which is often discussed on our forums (which they seem to read regularly). We discussed about the recent advances in Starforce emulation (Starfuck, StarforceNightmare), but they don't seem to worry much about them. They consider that these tools are only useful to a few experts, and that they are anyway made obsolete at each new Starforce version. So for now they keep updating each new version and don't plan a version 4.0.

Then this day was over as well. With sore feet again, we quickly went to get some rest…