Topic: News

Prices for integrated MPEG-2 chips used in DVD recorders are expected to drop from about US$40 currently to below US$30 in the second half of 2004, as a result of intensified competition and greater pressure from clients to lower costs, sources at international chip suppliers said.

Taiwan's second-tier optical disc makers are preparing to begin production of 8x DVD+R/-R discs in the first quarter of 2004. The second-tier makers include GigaStorage, Lead Data, Daxon Technology and Nan Ya Plastics. The first tier consists of three companies: CMC Magnetics, Prodisc Technology and Ritek. Nan Ya Plastics is a leader in Taiwan's plastics industry but its production of optical storage media is small in comparison to its other business divisions.

Police in Edgewater, Maryland say they have uncovered the cause of a friday night shooting incident. Robert Preston Kersey, 34, angered by his flatmates playing their X-box loudly in the early hours stormed into their living room and fired a single gunshot into the game system, disabling it, police said.

Senior officials at Philips Semiconductor, Europe's third largest chipmaker, said yesterday that the outlook for DVD recorder sales next year is rosy. "We see a great role for the DVD recorder in the home," Indro Mukerjee, an executive vice president at Philips, told reporters in Taipei yesterday. "We see DVD [recorders] becoming more pervasive as the price comes down and more and more recorders go into the home."

Xbox has proved to be the biggest hit at Sitex 2003 as more than 2,000 units of the Xbox Limited Edition Holiday Bundle were snapped up over the four-day exhibition in Singapore. The Limited Edition Holiday Bundle contains the Xbox console, 3 games (Halo, Tetris and Star Wars: The Clone Wars) and the Xbox DVD Movie Playback Kit.

Taiwan's top three producers of optical discs - Ritek, CMC and Prodisc - have started or will soon start production of 8x DVD+R/-R discs, according to the companies.

A picture purporting to be concept art of Sony's next-generation console, the PlayStation 3, has been circulated on the Internet, showing a sleek silver console with a slot-loading DVD drive.

Memorex have announced what they call 'the Memorex True 8X' 8X8 Dual Format DVD recorder. '8X8' refers to the fact the drive burns at 8X to both DVD-R and DVD+R formats. The 'True 8x' refers to their claim that "existing competitor 8X DVD drives use a process commonly known as 'overburn' to stretch 4X technology and 4X media limits. This process pushes the power of the drive's laser to its limits through firmware modification, bypassing the specified tolerance levels of the hardware components to deliver 8X DVD recording."

Philips has launched the Nexperia PNX7200, a single-chip MPEG-2 codec for DVD recording applications. The Nexperia PNX7200 enables a low system-cost solution, reducing bill of material (BoM) costs by up to 30%, according to a press release from the company today.

Sony have said it is shipping blue laser-based optical storage drives and related products to equipment manufacturers and system integrators. The new Professional Disc for DATA products include media cartridges that store up to 23GB of data, Sony said.

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Sony is planning to enable future versions of its PlayStation gaming console to recognise user gestures and even emotions, according to an executive. The PlayStation 3 may also incorporate a motion sensor and camera add-on known as EyeToy.

TDK have unveiled a new pupose built CD/DVD label printer following the success of their LPCW-50. The LPCW-100 is designed for ease of use, "design the layout of the disc using the computer software supplied, then just insert the disc into the printer and it will print onto the top surface of the disc using dry ink to prevent smudging. It has a high print resolution, which means that even small text is clear and easy to read."

Malaysia's brazen software pirates are hawking the next version of Microsoft's Windows operating system years before it is supposed to be on sale.

The PK-AX300H, due out in late January 2004, from NEC is the latest DVD recorder that comes with a 300GB hard disk. It can record up to 423 hours of MPEG-2 video (1.2Mbps) on the disk.

Sony has dropped several features from its upcoming PSX, a product the company describes as one of its most important this year, because it has not been able to complete development in time for the year-end sales period.

Our resident DVD guru Flash has been busy preparing an article which outlines how to install a new DVD burner.

Researchers at Princeton University working with Hewlett-Packard have invented a new form of permanent computer memory that uses plastic, and may be much cheaper and faster than existing silicon circuits.

Jon Johansen is fighting back against those who say he has created a program for illegally copying music files. The Norwegian hacker famed for defeating Hollywood in a cyberpiracy trial has rejected allegations he had illegally unlocked a code that enables unauthorised copying of music files from the Internet.

Microsoft's Xbox has had its most successful week to date this year in Japan, capturing almost seven per cent market share following a price cut to the hardware and the launch of a Project Gotham Racing 2 bundle deal.