Hitachi Ltd has a new CD-ROM drive for which it claims a world first in that editing of image data is possible: the CDR-5150 is designed for use with personal computers and workstations, and provides all the functions for data manipulation in the drive itself: it comes with an expandable 4Mb standard memory which is used for expansion of images compressed to between a tenth and a 30th of their size on the CD-ROM disk; an image expanded in this way can be made larger, smaller, rotated and moved in the document and then saved on the hard disk of the connected micro, in compressed format using a compression function provided; the CDR-5150 also conforms to the SGML ISO-standard language, which means that it can read CD-ROMs of published Japanese patents, now being released in that form by the Japanese patent office; it is already being incorporated in systems, with Raios Systems, a Japanese systems house, incorporating it with an IBM PS-55 personal computer.
