James Delahunty
19 May 2005 3:36
The President of Matsushita, Kunio Nakamura said that it is now up to Toshiba to yield its position in talks on a unified next gen DVD format making it clear neither Matsushita nor their partner Sony will budge. This is just the latest of many signs that talks between the two have hit some problems. Both sides decided to engage in talks earlier this year to attempt to avoid a format war that would cost each side millions of dollars and would discourage consumers from choosing to move to next generation discs.
One key problem is that both sides would prefer a unified standard based on their own disc structure, which is quite understandable since each side has spent enormous sums of money and time to develop it. "The talks continue, they have not collapsed," Nakamura said. "But Matsushita and Sony have not changed their stance. We are waiting for Toshiba's decision." For several months both sides have bee competing with each other to gain support for their formats.
Blu-ray has one major advantage over HD-DVD; it can hold 50GB which is about 20GB more than HD-DVD. However, firms backing HD-DVD claim that it would cost a lot less to the industry to adopt it because it is very close to the structure of current available discs. Both formats utilize the use of blue lasers, which have much shorter wavelengths than red lasers allowing discs to store data at the higher densities.
Source:
Reuters