All the Japanese majors bar Sony, and six US companies, have come out in favour of the Composite/Continuous format for 5.25 optical disk recording over the Sampled Servo alternative. Japanese backers are Fujitsu, Hitachi, Toshiba, Matsushita, NEC, NTT, Mitsubishi, Sanyo, Ricoh, Sharp and Daicel Chemical, while US backing comes from Maxtor, Hewlett-Packard, Emulex, Philips & Du Pont Optical, Scientific Microsystems and Western Digital. The 17 claim the format, good for read-only, write-once and erasable disks gives faster access time and higher data rates. The IEEE X3B11 US and the SC-23 Japanese committees will thrash out details of the standard.
