The racks that carry the Digital Compact Cassettes and the MiniDisks in the record stores are small ghettos – if they can be found at all, and it is clear that the battle between the Philips Electronics NV and the Sony Corp bids to create the next standard for recorded music is not going well for either, but Sony is moving to increase volume and thereby reduce costs by offering the recordable MiniDisk as a personal computer storage device as well. The 2.5 disk currently has 140Mb capacity, Sony calls it the MD Data, and claims that in computer applications, it can store the equivalent of 2,000 frames of still colour images, or 15 minutes of compressed full motion video – 100 times more than a floppy disk. Sony reckons that it will be good for graphics applications that require a far higher volume of data than text, but the downside is that as with all optical disks, the access time is slow compared with magnetic disks. No details were available of price or of availability of recordable platters or of drives with computer interfaces.
