PC storage specialist Iomega Corporation has begun worldwide shipment of its much anticipated 2 gigabyte Jaz drives and disks two months later than originally planned. The company said the delay was due to further product testing. Jaz 2, billed to offer twice the capacity and 40 percent higher performance than Iomega’s original Jaz 1GB is aimed at multimedia professionals and other high-end professionals with bottomless storage needs. The drives will be available worldwide this month at an estimated street price of about $650. Iomega has also begun shipping its Buz multimedia producer, a product first announced in July last year. Buz is designed to act as a combination video capture card, Ultra SCSI controller and software suite offering a way for home multimedia users to get, movies, photos and music from camcorders, DVD-ROMs, digital cameras, VCRs and laser disks into a personal computer. It has an estimated street price of $199.95. By its own admission Iomega is subject to very little price competition in the personal computer removable storage market where alongside the success of its more renowned zip drives it claims to have sold over 1 million Jaz 1GB drives in the last two years. The company currently boasts a sixty two percent share of the removable PC storage market but has recently failed in its first attempt to hold back the competition. The company has begun attempts to prove that arch rival Nomai SA has duplicated the shape of it’s Zip storage cartridge but a preliminary injunction originally secured against Nomai was overturned in a French court just before Xmas. Last month Iomega reporting fourth quarter profits of $36.12 up 77% from $20.35m last time on revenue that climbed to $546.76m, up 37.7% from $397.05m. For the year net income was up 101% at $115.35m compared with $57.32m last time on revenue that rose 43% to $1.73bn from $1.21bn last year.
