X-bit labs

Annual Hardware Overview: A Glance Back at the Year 2003 (page 18)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 01/08/2004 | 11:51 PM ]

The prices did plummet. During the fall, volume prices for one-format 4x DVD-drives fell from $220 to $88 in Taiwan. Multi-format devices got a new volume price of $160-180. 8x DVD-burners came down from the original $160-180 mark to $140-150 after a month of being around. No wonder Sony preferred to leave this market, handing over its DVD+RW drive manufacture to Taiwanese OEMs who had earlier dropped the prices on entering the market (earlier in 2003, Yamaha left the CD-RW field for similar reasons).

Let me give you more detail from now on. The last year started out with 4x DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW (and multi-format) drives that had just appeared. After that, there was a long silence – until the end of summer. The formats were testing each other’s strength. Summing up the results in the end of the year we can say that the “+” format won as it is now more popular among the manufacturers.

As for the speed factor, 8x models came into shops in the fall, and 12x ones are expected in the beginning of 2004. 16x models are scheduled for the end of 2004 – Philips already has a working prototype. This may be the end of the race, as 16x speed is the physical limit, according to the technicians. A minor disappointment of the year: Philips announced a DVD+RW drive with the SerialATA interface at the spring IDF, but the idea has never been put into life.

Anyway, these are no big problems, as the future is tapping on the door. There is only one question – what future should we let in? We’ve got Blue-ray and Advanced Optical Disc: the former seems more real as Sony already showcased a Blue-ray drive and a VCR, while Matsushita demoed single-layer 23GB discs and dual-layer 50GB 2x discs (9MB/s). Theoretically, this can be purchased right now, unlike AOD systems from NEC and Toshiba, that are still only prototypes.

So far the two camps used DVD Forum as the fighting ground. Some innovations like Enhanced DVD (the current DVD plus enhanced functionality like links to websites with additional information) or adding a second layer to DVD-R discs (8.5GB in total, there is a similar proposal with respect to DVD+R) passed calmly to be implemented in 2004. HD-DVD was another matter.

The Blue-ray consortium has no need in a specification that describes discs of a 15GB capacity per layer (against 33GB in Blue-ray), as it is a direct competitor to their own product. NEC and Toshiba, who proposed it, need it to get a timeout for perfecting their AOD. Taking great pains, at a third try, after promoting their own members into DVD-Forum, the couple managed to push the specification on. It’s another question whether they will make it into a de facto standard.