History 2000: DVD+RW Fan Sony Joins DVD-RW Camp

Very surprising, the recent attitude adopted by Sony with respect to erasable DVDs.

Although the firm has been part of the DVD Forum since its inception, it had distanced itself from the organization’s erasable DVDs, only to come back to the starting point.

Back in February, the DVD Forum approved the DVD-RW format for rewritable disks, even if the same organization also endorsed the DVD-RAM standard.

Recall that another group, headed by HP, Philips, Ricoh, Sony and Yamaha has been working on DVD+RW. Each of the 3 standards is incompatible with the others, which has created a considerable amount of confusion in this domain.

Since Pioneer was alone in investing in DVD-RW technology, few pundits in the industry were giving it great odds. But surprise of surprises, now Sony has rallied around, changing the deal entirely.

Indeed, 12 different companies have just agreed to start a new organization, the RW Products Promotion initiative (RWPPI), in order to propose and promote the 4.7GB DVD-RW. This includes Pioneer and Sony, of course, but also Kenwood, LG Electronics, Onkyo, Sanyo, Sharp, along with disk manufacturers Fuji, Hitachi Maxell, Mitsubishi Chemical and TDK. Samsung may still join in, even Toshiba, a confirmed supporter of DVD-RAM with its partners, Hitachi and Matsushita.

According to a Japanese source, Sony by no means intends to abandon its DVD+RW plans. One of the intentions of the RWPPI would also be to align the DVD-RW and DVD+RW projects.

Note, furthermore, that the organization’s initials contains both the letters R and W, but with nothing preceding.

DVD-RWs, a derivative of Pioneer’s DVD-R, is not being designed to offer 100,000 rewrites, as is the case with DVD-RAM, but will content itself with 1000, as with current CD-RWs, using only the simpler groove recording, rather than the more sophisticated land-and-groove structure employed by DVD-RAM technology. Compatibility with DVD video applications will also be easier to achieve.

Several tens of thousands of DVD-RW recorders have been already sold in Japan by Pioneer or its OEM Sharp.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 149 on June 2000 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.