Asia and Pacific
CEATEC: Sanyo shows prototype HD-DVD player
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service (Tokyo Bureau)
Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. unveiled a prototype player supporting the next-generation optical disc format HD-DVD at the Ceatec 2004 show as it got under way in Japan on Tuesday.
The company's HD-DVD player was on show alongside a prototype from Toshiba Corp., which has been seen at other events. No additional details of either machine were available, although the presence of a Sanyo player at the show points toward a start to HD-DVD development at Sanyo before the company announced its support for the format on Aug. 31.
HD-DVD was developed under the auspices of the DVD Forum and draws heavily on technology from both Toshiba and NEC Corp. Major Japanese optical disc-maker Memory-Tech Corp. has also been involved in disc production technology. The format uses a blue laser to enable storage of several times more data than a conventional DVD on an equivalent size disc. A group of other companies, led by Sony Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., has proposed and developed a rival format called Blu-ray Disc.
The new Sanyo player and Toshiba prototype were on show in a joint HD-DVD promotion booth that also had on display several sample discs made by a number of companies, including Memory-Tech Corp., Ritek Corp., Prodisc Technology Inc., Mitsubishi Kagaku Media Co. Ltd., Hitachi Maxell Ltd., Imation Corp., Cinram International Inc. and Advanced Media Corp.
The discs included single-sided and double-sided ROM discs, or 15G-byte and 30G-byte capacity, and single-layer HD-DVD-R discs of 20G-byte capacity. All of the discs were genuine samples, as opposed to other optical discs with HD-DVD labels, and all the companies were preparing for mass production, said a spokeswoman for Toshiba.
Toshiba and NEC have promised to commercialize HD-DVD during 2005. The first commercial Blu-ray Disc machines are already on the market in Japan, although sales have been limited by a high price tag and an inability to play back prerecorded content.
Asia and Pacific
CEATEC: BenQ to launch HDD media player this year
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service (Tokyo Bureau)
Taiwanese hardware maker BenQ Corp. is planning to launch a new hard-disk drive-based digital media player later this year, the company said at the Ceatec Japan 2004 exhibition on Friday.
The player will be part of its Joybee range of digital media players. It contains a 4G-byte hard disk drive and accepts SD (Secure Digital) memory cards, said Noriyuki Kitamura, a product manager for digital audio products at BenQ Japan Co. Ltd.
On its front panel is a TFT (thin film transistor) LCD (liquid crystal display) panel and, under that, a touch-sensitive control panel. The player is a redesigned version of a prototype that was shown by the company at the Computex exhibition in Taiwan earlier this year.
With its shape, white exterior, LCD and circular control dial, the earlier player resembled at first glance Apple Computer Inc.?s iPod but the new player has lost some of these influences. It is now silver in color and features a square touch-sensitive control panel under the main display.
It will support playback of MP3, Windows Media Audio and WAV format audio files and JPEG images, said Kitamura. It will go on sale worldwide in December and will cost around US$300, he said.
Asia and Pacific
TOKYO EDGE: October's coolest gadgets
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service (Tokyo Bureau)
Toshiba Gigabeat F-series
Toshiba Corp. has updated its Gigabeat hard-disk drive-based digital music player with a new series of three players that offer capacities of 10G bytes, 20G bytes or 60G bytes. The exterior design of the Gigabeat player has been revised to sport a 2.2-inch QVGA (240 pixels by 320 pixels) color LCD and a navigation button that looks like a large "plus" sign in the center of the player's front panel. The devices play MP3, Windows Media Audio and WAV files, although the files have to be passed through To-shiba's "Gigabeat Room" software and that's only available for Windows XP or Windows 2000, so Mac or Linux users are out of luck. Images, such as album art, can also be uploaded to display when songs are playing. The players will go on sale in Japan from late November. The MEGF10 10G-byte model will cost ¥39,800 and the MEGF20 20G-byte model will cost ¥44,800. The MEGF60 60G-byte model will be on sale in Japan from early December and will cost ¥64,800. Overseas sales will begin in early 2005 in the U.S. and Europe.
Web: http://www.gigabeat.net (Japanese)
Epson P-2000 Photo Player
Most snap-happy digital photographers would probably consider Seiko Epson Corp.'s P-2000 a welcome addition to their camera bag. The gadget features a 40G-byte hard-disk drive that can be used to store images from memory cards. That means you don?t have to worry about running out of card space or carrying a notebook PC with you when on the road - just insert the memory card into the P-2000, transfer the images across and then clear the card and starting shooting again. It's compatible with SD (Secure Digital), Multimedia Card and Compact Flash cards including MicroDrive. The P-2000 has a 3.8-inch display for viewing the images and supports, for viewing, all JPEG images and also RAW-format image files from several Nikon Corp. and Canon Inc. cameras and Epson's R-D1. The 40G-byte capacity is enough for around 5,000 RAWtype images and up to 10,000 5-megapixel class JPEG images, said Epson. It will be available in Japan from late October and will cost just under ¥60,000 (US$545). The company has no immediate plans to sell it overseas.