Audio Video News

High-definition broadcasting is here, if the marketing problems are ever solved. Hi-def playback is here in the 480p native format of the Digital Versatile Disc. What's missing? Hi-def recording technology for consumers.

The movie industry is going to hate this. At CEATEC, a Japanese electronics trade show held the first week of October, Sony Corporation and Pioneer Electronics debuted a DVD recorder with a short-wavelength blue laser—a machine that promises to boost the capacity of DVDs to 22.5 gigabytes, almost five times the capacity of the current format. (A normal DVD-RAM disc holds 4.7GB of data.) The blue laser in the recorder on display at CEATEC was purchased jointly by the two companies from Nichia Chemical Industries. Sony and Pioneer engineers worked up to the last moment before the show to get the prototype working.

Blue lasers were long thought to be unattainable, but were perfected at Nichia after many years of research. Blue lasers can pack more information onto optical discs because they operate at a wavelength of 405 nanometers, compared to the 650nm of standard red lasers. The increased data density could accommodate 2.5 hours of high-definition television, according to Sony and Pioneer engineers. HDTV recorders would boost the incentive for consumers to adopt the new format, marketing executives believe.

Also pushing the trend, Hitachi Ltd. and South Korea's LG Electronics Inc. (parent company of Zenith) have entered a joint venture to develop and market high-density discs with more than four times the capacity of standard CDs and DVDs. Hitachi-LG Data Storage Inc. will make optical drives capable of storing and reading 20GB of memory. Such capacity translates to 10 hours of standard-definition video on a single disc. The global market for advanced optical storage devices could exceed $70 billion over the next three years, according to research firm Technical Insights.

The joint venture, which will launch in January, is intended to reduce development costs for the high-density disc drives, which will be built at Hitachi and LG Electronics factories. The companies' aim is "to grab the largest share of this market worldwide,'' Hitachi president Etsuhiko Shoyama said at a news conference. The current annual market for optical disc drives is approximately 200 million units worldwide.