James Delahunty
9 Jun 2005 21:05
The latest event in the next generation DVD format war has been an announcement by Hitachi Maxell and a unit of Mitsubishi Chemical stating that they will launch HD DVD based "write-once" discs in 2006. Billions of dollars are to fight for between the Blu Ray group (led by Sony) and the HD-DVD (High Definition DVD group, led by Toshiba) as both sides attempt to make their formats look more appealing to the entertainment and software industries and also consumers.
The new write-once discs will be launched next year in time for the scheduled launch of HD DVD recorders by Toshiba. In the current blank DVD media market, write-once media (DVD-R & DVD+R) accounts for 87% of demand whereas rewritable discs account for the rest. Blu-Ray DVD recorders have already been launched by the Blu Ray camp as well as rewritable Blu-Ray media but not write-once media just yet. However, Sony expects the write-once Blu-Ray discs to be available hopefully by the last quarter of 2005.
While Blu-Ray discs have higher capacity storage than HD-DVD discs, the HD-DVD camp argues that the HD-DVD format is a better choice for the industries because it would be a less costly transition due to a current DVD-like disc structure. Hitachi Maxell and Mitsubishi Kagaku have said that write-once HD-DVD discs can be produced using existing production equipment.
Source:
News.com