A battle looms over which companies will get the lion’s share of the emerging market in China for digital video discs (DVD) recorders: DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW, all of which basically do the same thing.
There could be more than one winner in the DVD format recording wars, and all formats are compatible with existing DVD drives to put computer and home entertainment centers together. Content recorded on one will be editable and playable on the other.
The problem is that the first DVD recorders available in China, DVD-Ram and DVD-RW were not compatible with each other. To solve that problem a group including Hitachi, Panasonic and Toshiba has now introduced DVD+RW. Drives that record in DVD+RW are touted as being able to read DVD-ROM, CD-RW and CD-R discs.
The DVD-RAM available recorder also is not compatible with many of the standard DVD-ROM drives found in today’s computers and home video systems. DVD-RAM proponents say that the problem mainly affects older DVD-ROM drives, but that’s small comfort to those who own them.
DVD-RW from Sony is limited to 1,000 rewrite operations but Sony recently introduced a desktop PC that uses DVD-RW to record television programs.
(CIIC 08/10/2001)
