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| Posted by | Herbert |
| Posted on | 25/03/05 21:10 |
Day 4 - Sunday 13th March:
Our last day at CeBIT 2005 and with few meetings, we basically had some more time to explore. But let us start with the meeting we had with Samsung.
Samsung electronics:
Samsung electronics proudly showed their latest products. Especially the Blu-ray drives.
The BD-R1000 is a very nice designed product, and in finalized, working version.
Samsung was then kind enough to demonstrate this new drive for us. The BD disc uses a cartridge, but it is easy to open, so there are no problems with removing the disc from the cartridge.
The Samsung Blu-ray half-height PC drive. A working sample he claimed, but they were not yet able to demonstrate it. They do Expect the drive to hit the market early in 2006.
They also have a full range of DVD-Writers. The specifications of the latest SH-W162C and SE-W164A is 16x DVD+/-R, 8x DVD+RW, 6x DVD-RW and 5x DVD+R DL and 4x DVD-R DL.
We had a very long conversation with Samsung, and the guys were very nice to us and honestly interested on feedback on their products.
Let us do a short Q & A session.
Q: Why not combine Toshiba and Samsung drives now that they have joined each other in the TSST group?
A: Due to demand for both drive brands we will continue with both. Toshiba have a good OEM brand - so we will continue to make them.
Q: Why not use Toshiba chipset in the Samsung drives?
A: The production volume limit on the Toshiba chipset is 100.000 per month, which is too little, and thus we picked Mediatek for the latest Samsung branded drives.
Q: Why is the writing quality with Samsung products not as good as with many other drives?
A: Really? To our experience the writing quality is quite good with known brand discs. But we will continue to improve the firmware.
Q: You support Blu-ray and Toshiba supports HD-DVD, could you tell us a bit about this?
A: We think we both learn from this, maybe we will even see drives and chipsets combining both Blu-ray and HD-DVD in the future. But that is too early to say yet.
Q: Will your drives support bitsetting?
A: Yes, we hope to implement this by firmware update.
He also told us that they are looking into adding DVD-RAM support to the next drive to be developed. And that Samsungs goal was to be the best, period.
Ritek / Conrexx:
Next on our list was to visit Ritek to take some photos.
They did of course display 16x DVD+/-R media as well as 4x double layer media and the usual stuff that everybody shows. But Ritek have other products as well, let us take a look on a few of those.
Ritek do also have Flash memory of various types.
And like most others they did display HD-DVD products. But then we suddenly heard a damn lot of noise and ran to find out what it was…
E-Net distribution:
It was a man at the E-Net stand playing on a bag pipe, which caused people to come running from everywhere, just to see where the loud noise came from.
E-Net is very large in Europe and owns brands like Datawrite, Datasafe, Bulkpaq, Budget, Rivision and Ridisc as shown here.
And here is some of the later additions to their list of brands, Tuff disc claims to be more scratch resistant than other media.
Gigabyte:
We did a quick visit at Gigabyte, they do not focus much on optical drives - but we found a CD-Writer and DVD-Writer. Both are really Lite-On OEM drives and the DVD-Writer seems to be an OEM SOHW-1673S.
MSI:
We did the same for MSI, just a quick look. Their DVD-Writers seems to be OEM BenQ drives, the latest one is an OEM DW1640.
Summary:
This year we did miss some companies at CeBIT, for example Philips, Pioneer and Verbatim did not have a stand at CeBIT. And for the optical drive world there was no big news, Blu-ray and HD-DVD are still not 100% finished and 16x DVD-Writers have been around for a while already.
Yet one of the main benefits for us as an optical drive information and news site is that we are able to visit so many companies and strengthen our relationship with them during the visit at CeBIT.
Now the journey home started and after plane delays for some of us and heavy rain for others, we finally came home in good condition. Although tired and with aching feet after walking for miles to see the show.
CeBIT 2005 - Day 3
Sure seems like DL is going to be dead in the water based on no one really making media...
It's disappointing to read of the lack of support for dual layer media by any of the other disc manufacturers. As long as who does make it prices it cheaper then it won't matter too much I guess.
I would interested to know if Taiyo Yuden was developing any dual layer media.
[edited by DoMiN8ToR on 23.03.2005 22:11]
The most large internet-sites have their Cebit reviews online for a few days.
So I didn't read anything really new.
No news about the NEC ND-4550A?
I like the fact that more and more companies are going to add DVD-RAM support.
Next time we'll be much faster
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