There are three reasons I've been holding off of getting a dvd rewriteable:
1 price--they are still expensive; the player and the media in comparison to CD-RW;
2 schism--there are three formats that show no sign of conforming soon; and from a technological stand point, could not easily do so;
3 hasn't reached 17 gig landmark capacity--when DVD's info was published in 1996, the PR said that DVD's would be capable of 17 gig capacity: double-sided, double density (two layers); seven years later, where are the doubled-sided disks (i.e. could existing double-sided players read and record double density 17 gig media? I doubt it)?
Since all three types of recorders can play all variants of CD's and DVD-ROM, the lack of a standard is only an issue when trying to play material from another recorder, or potentially when trying to play recorded material on someone else's player. So, since DVD-RAM is the "official" (original DVD consortium standard--Panasonic and Hitachi) I would lean in that direction.
Since I'm a digital home movie hobbyist, the extra capacity promised by these disks would help a lot, because standard NTSC DV dwarfs the size of the MPEG 2 on DVDs (20 minutes of DV uses up 5 gigs!). But I don't want to purchase a DVD-RAM just to find out two months later, capacities are doubled and my recorder is obsolete/half the value.
I've run searches around the net, and the ones I've found basically say the same about the 17 gig capacities and more like the article below, but still I've found nothing concrete i.e. a press release saying "Hitachi to start shipping 17 Gig DVD-RAM in August" etc:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache...+be+double+side+density+17+gigs&hl=en&start=3
DVD: It's Getting Bigger All the Time
I had the good fortune to attend a fascinating press conference at the recent PC Expo in New York, during which Hitachi bigwigs outlined their plans for the next two generations of DVD-ROM and for DVD-ROM's writeable cousin, DVD-RAM. Even to this jaded technophile, their predictions for DVD capacities in the early Third Millennium were mind-boggling.
But first, a few Hitachi developments of more immediate interest: The company's first three DVD-RAM drives -- the GF-1000 (internal ATAPI), the GF-1050 (internal SCSI), and the GF 1055 (external SCSI) will be ready to ship late this year. All three will have an identical internal mechanism that will record 2.6 GB of data on each side of a one- or two-sided cartridge. Transfer rates will average around 1.38 MB per second, with burst rates from cache at 16.6 MB per second for ATAPI and 10 MB per second for SCSI models.
The read/write head on these drives will be of a two-laser design, with a 780-nanometer laser for reading CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, CD-ROM XA, and CD-I discs and a 650-nanometer laser for reading from and writing to their phase-change DVD-RAM discs. Expect two-sided DVD-RAM cartridges to cost about $30 apiece upon introduction and to drop to around $20 soon after.
DVD-RAM drives that don't require cartridges are also planned, but for later: The GF-2000 ATAPI version won't appear from Hitachi until mid-'98, with the GF-2050 SCSI model following on in '99. After that, the next big DVD-RAM development will be a model appearing in early '00 that'll have an average throughput rate of around 2.76 MB per second and whose discs will have a capacity of 4.7 GB per side.
Now, the idea of having nearly 10 GB of fast, durable, inexpensive removable storage sounds pretty slick to me -- even if I have to wait until my 50th birthday. (Yes, gentle readers, I'm an Old Fart at Play -- my 47th birthday is this Sunday.) However, the really exciting stuff won't happen until I'm 51, and the really, really, mind-boggling developments aren't scheduled until my 55th trip around ol' Sol.
By 2001, Hitachi engineers project, they'll have made sufficient advances in green- and blue-laser technologies, multilayer technology, and high-density signal processing to triple current DVD-ROM capacity and more than quadruple first-generation DVD-RAM capacity from 3 gigabits per square inch and 2 gigabits per square inch, respectively, to a full 9 gigabits per square inch each. Let me do the math for you: A current single-sided DVD disc holds 4.7 GB; a double-sided disc holds 8.5 GB; and a double-sided, double-layered Fat Boy weighs in at a full 17 GB. Triple those, and we're talking around 15, 30, and 60 GB -- sure, there are a few extra gigs slopping around the edges, but at these capacities, who's counting?
The truly mind-boggling prediction Hitachi engineers are confidently making, however, is that by the year 2005, they'll be able to further triple the 15-, 30-, and 60-GB capacities, with the result that a single DVD disc will be able to hold 45, 90, or -- gulp -- 180 GB of data, video, text, images, and who knows what the hell else.
The question that pops to mind, of course, is, "How on earth is anyone ever going to fill up a disc that can hold 180 gigabytes of data?" The answer: We don't know -- yet. But I can offer a bit of insight from experience: Back in the early '80s, I managed a multiuser MP/M system that served 16 users. Our storage system -- if you could call it that -- was a bank of four eight-inch floppy-disk drives, each with a capacity of 1 MB. When we finally acquired a hard drive for our system, it held a whopping 80 MB -- for 16 users, remember. Much hilarity ensued: "Five megabytes each? We'll never use that much space, ever..."
1 price--they are still expensive; the player and the media in comparison to CD-RW;
2 schism--there are three formats that show no sign of conforming soon; and from a technological stand point, could not easily do so;
3 hasn't reached 17 gig landmark capacity--when DVD's info was published in 1996, the PR said that DVD's would be capable of 17 gig capacity: double-sided, double density (two layers); seven years later, where are the doubled-sided disks (i.e. could existing double-sided players read and record double density 17 gig media? I doubt it)?
Since all three types of recorders can play all variants of CD's and DVD-ROM, the lack of a standard is only an issue when trying to play material from another recorder, or potentially when trying to play recorded material on someone else's player. So, since DVD-RAM is the "official" (original DVD consortium standard--Panasonic and Hitachi) I would lean in that direction.
Since I'm a digital home movie hobbyist, the extra capacity promised by these disks would help a lot, because standard NTSC DV dwarfs the size of the MPEG 2 on DVDs (20 minutes of DV uses up 5 gigs!). But I don't want to purchase a DVD-RAM just to find out two months later, capacities are doubled and my recorder is obsolete/half the value.
I've run searches around the net, and the ones I've found basically say the same about the 17 gig capacities and more like the article below, but still I've found nothing concrete i.e. a press release saying "Hitachi to start shipping 17 Gig DVD-RAM in August" etc:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache...+be+double+side+density+17+gigs&hl=en&start=3
DVD: It's Getting Bigger All the Time
I had the good fortune to attend a fascinating press conference at the recent PC Expo in New York, during which Hitachi bigwigs outlined their plans for the next two generations of DVD-ROM and for DVD-ROM's writeable cousin, DVD-RAM. Even to this jaded technophile, their predictions for DVD capacities in the early Third Millennium were mind-boggling.
But first, a few Hitachi developments of more immediate interest: The company's first three DVD-RAM drives -- the GF-1000 (internal ATAPI), the GF-1050 (internal SCSI), and the GF 1055 (external SCSI) will be ready to ship late this year. All three will have an identical internal mechanism that will record 2.6 GB of data on each side of a one- or two-sided cartridge. Transfer rates will average around 1.38 MB per second, with burst rates from cache at 16.6 MB per second for ATAPI and 10 MB per second for SCSI models.
The read/write head on these drives will be of a two-laser design, with a 780-nanometer laser for reading CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, CD-ROM XA, and CD-I discs and a 650-nanometer laser for reading from and writing to their phase-change DVD-RAM discs. Expect two-sided DVD-RAM cartridges to cost about $30 apiece upon introduction and to drop to around $20 soon after.
DVD-RAM drives that don't require cartridges are also planned, but for later: The GF-2000 ATAPI version won't appear from Hitachi until mid-'98, with the GF-2050 SCSI model following on in '99. After that, the next big DVD-RAM development will be a model appearing in early '00 that'll have an average throughput rate of around 2.76 MB per second and whose discs will have a capacity of 4.7 GB per side.
Now, the idea of having nearly 10 GB of fast, durable, inexpensive removable storage sounds pretty slick to me -- even if I have to wait until my 50th birthday. (Yes, gentle readers, I'm an Old Fart at Play -- my 47th birthday is this Sunday.) However, the really exciting stuff won't happen until I'm 51, and the really, really, mind-boggling developments aren't scheduled until my 55th trip around ol' Sol.
By 2001, Hitachi engineers project, they'll have made sufficient advances in green- and blue-laser technologies, multilayer technology, and high-density signal processing to triple current DVD-ROM capacity and more than quadruple first-generation DVD-RAM capacity from 3 gigabits per square inch and 2 gigabits per square inch, respectively, to a full 9 gigabits per square inch each. Let me do the math for you: A current single-sided DVD disc holds 4.7 GB; a double-sided disc holds 8.5 GB; and a double-sided, double-layered Fat Boy weighs in at a full 17 GB. Triple those, and we're talking around 15, 30, and 60 GB -- sure, there are a few extra gigs slopping around the edges, but at these capacities, who's counting?
The truly mind-boggling prediction Hitachi engineers are confidently making, however, is that by the year 2005, they'll be able to further triple the 15-, 30-, and 60-GB capacities, with the result that a single DVD disc will be able to hold 45, 90, or -- gulp -- 180 GB of data, video, text, images, and who knows what the hell else.
The question that pops to mind, of course, is, "How on earth is anyone ever going to fill up a disc that can hold 180 gigabytes of data?" The answer: We don't know -- yet. But I can offer a bit of insight from experience: Back in the early '80s, I managed a multiuser MP/M system that served 16 users. Our storage system -- if you could call it that -- was a bank of four eight-inch floppy-disk drives, each with a capacity of 1 MB. When we finally acquired a hard drive for our system, it held a whopping 80 MB -- for 16 users, remember. Much hilarity ensued: "Five megabytes each? We'll never use that much space, ever..."
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