Sony Corp and five other companies yesterday formally announced their own rewritable disc standard for DVD Digital Video Disk players and computers. The new disk, called Phase-Change Rewritable, is a 120mm disc format designed to be read by future DVD-ROM drives. It will be will be supported by Hewlett-Packard Co, Philips Electronics NV, Mitsubishi Chemical Corp, Ricoh Co and Yamaha Corp. The new Sony disk will be able to store 3.0Gb of data on one side, as opposed to DVD-RAMs that support 2.6Gb. Sony plans to release the 3.0Gb disk by the end of next June, but the launch date will vary among the six firms, Sony said. The new disk will not be compatible with DVD-RAMs, the other rewritable disc technology that Sony announced this year with a group of 10 electronic equipment makers that included Philips. DVD-RAMs are due out on the market by the year end. Last month Sony Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Philips Electronics NV made moves to seek approval for the separate DVD+RW re-recordable DVD standard that is incompatible with the DVD-RAM re-recordable standard that it agreed in the group of 10. Sony, Philips and Hewlett-Packard said one of the reasons for a move to a separate format is that its DVD+RW format is more compatible with DVD-ROMs, which are already used in personal computers, than the DVD-RAM format proposed by the 10.
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