It looks like Four Weddings and a Funeral versus Jurassic Park now that Sony Corp and Philips Electronics NV have decided to proceed with their compact video disk standard despite most of the rest of the industry lining up behind Toshiba Corp’s rival specification following Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd’s decision to back the latter. Philips’ Polygram unit made Four Weddings, Matsushita’s MCA made Jurrasic Park. We aren’t joining the Toshiba format because we’re convinced it’s not the best format, Sony Electronics Inc said. The first video compact disk players and movies are expected to reach the market in the spring of 1996, and the winner is likely to be the one with the better set of movies available. Sony reckons players for its dual-layer single-sided disks will be the cheaper; it also says it is working on blue lasers to increase its capacity to 11Gb from 7.4Gb. Toshiba says it will continue trying to unify standards but claims better picture and sound quality.
