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| Posted by | Herbert |
| Posted on | 25/03/05 21:10 |
| Number of views | 3798 |
Day 1 - Thursday 10th march:
After some unexpected delays like a plane delay of 2 hours and some misunderstandings regarding our apartments during the time in Hannover, we were finally able to make our first visit at CeBIT. Unfortunately it was pretty late on that first evening, but we were just in time for the Blu-ray conference!
Blu-Ray conference
The Blu-ray developers first told us they had a surprise for us, so our interest was peaked immediately, what could they mean? Product availability earlier than expected? More storage capacity? Higher speeds?
Well, not really. The news is that Apple joined the Blu-Ray side as supporters of Blu-Ray instead of HD-DVD.
They told us that Blu-ray standalone recorders and readers are already for sale in Japan. So the technology is ready and is working,
They focused on the increased storage capacity of Blu-ray compared to HD-DVD, they believe that the computer and movie industry will soon realize the advantage of having even more storage to play with.
It looks like Philips, LG, Samsung and Sony already have optical pickups ready for use. In addition, other manufacturers are not far behind on developing pickup units.
Right now Blu-ray is aimed at a starting capacity of 50Gb using a double layer disc, but in the future they plan to have 100Gb discs by using 4 layers. And Sony is even experimenting with discs using 8 layers of storage capacity that will yield a whopping 200Gb size.
They also plan to increase the transfer speeds, even all the way up to 8x speed - a staggering 288Mbps! We would really like to see the computer and hard drive available to keep up with these high transfer speeds. But let us hope the transfer speeds internally in computers could also improve drastically to achieve these speeds.
Philips does also have a sample PC drive ready and working, although not yet in a finished stage - but still working. They showed that Nero and Sonic RecordNow are already working with Blu-ray as well.
Both Verbatim and TDK showed Blu-ray discs. As you probably know, the TDK discs use a special hard coating to overcome scratch problems. We think this technology will most likely be used by all manufacturers of Blu-ray media, simply because the discs will be less expensive to produce without needing a protective cartridge.
There were a lot of people at the conference, so we were unable to ask many questions to dedicated people. Besides that, we were pretty overwhelmed by the amount of information provided at the conference. ;)
One of the questions we were able to ask was the cost and specifically, the manufacturing cost of the discs.
The answer to this was that the cost of the manufacturing was calculated to be around 10% more than for regular DVD media. This is not including the investment cost for installing new Blu-ray manufacturing lines - so the discs will most likely be very expensive in the beginning to cover up for the initial capital investments. But after the production lines are installed the actual manufacturing cost was calculated to be about 10% higher than for regular DVD Media.
Well that was everything we were able to do the first day as the fair was closing. Let us continue to day two at next page.
Now listen what the people had to say
CeBIT - Introduction
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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