Like 100 meter runners eyeing each other up in an Olympic final, the Japanese consumer electronics majors are playing games of bluff and double bluff as they wait for the Digital Video Disk gun to be fired – and as at the Olympics, there are certain to be some false starts. Toshiba Corp and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co want to launch in late October in Japan at around $650, and Toshiba says it will have two models, one playing both standard compact disks and DVDs, and the other equipped for karaoke – but that turned out to be the first false start and Matsushita has now set November 1 as the launch date – and those prices look false too, because it has them pegged at $738 and $907. Matsushita claims it’ll manufacture 30,000 players a month. Pioneer Electronic Corp has a history in those ill-fated shiny 12 laser disks, and plans to market two Digital Video Disk players in October, one compatible with audio CDs and the other with laser disks; and Hitachi Ltd aims to have something out in October; an absentee at this year’s games will be Sony Corp, which is in training for the next Digital Video Disk race in spring, when it reckons there may be enough disks to excite demand.
