Growing fears of a bruising and costly standards war in digital video disks look more and more likely to be realised with the news that Sony Corp intends to release a consumer product based on its single-sided format by mid-1996, and that three new Japanese companies have lined up behind the proposed Sony-Philips Electronics NV standard, which still has less support than the rival Toshiba Corp double-sided standard. Sony’s player will be designed to play both Sony’s first-generation disks, which can store 3.7Gb of video, and its second-generation disks, which double that capacity by using a second layer beneath semi-transparent material. In Tokyo, Ricoh Co Ltd, Teac Corp and Mitsumi Electric Co Ltd, all of which make disk drives for computers, are backing the Sony-Philips standard as a step towards getting personal computer and office automation equipment makers to adopt it. Ricoh likes the fact that the standard is compatibile with existing compact disks, meaning users could still use their CD-ROM disks in the new drives. Mitsumi produces 500,000 CD-ROM drives a month and supplies drive parts to IBM Corp. Meantime Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd, Osaka, which is in the rival Toshiba camp, has announced development of a dual-layer disk of its own in the double-sided format, claiming it can store up to 9Gb on a single side of the 4.7 disk – without the second layer, the disk can store up to 10Gb using both sides. Use of the dual-layer process is seen as an alternative to using two sides rather than a means of storing a total of 20Gb on a single disk, since a double-sided two-layer disk would likely be too thick to be used in players designed for standard thickness disks.
