![]() Let's Make MultiRead Happen |
![]() David R. Guenette |
Then again, I just might like the CD-ReWritable (CD-RW) and MultiRead efforts on their own merits.
It isn't that strange that there is some resistance to CD-RW, and it is downright understandable from some quarters, such as the Panasonic/Plasmon/Toray (PD) combination phase change/CD-ROM drive side. It is true that PD has performance benefits over CD-RW, with PD's faster performance from formatting more akin to sectored hard drives than CD-ROM's own logical format. But CD-RW is close enough in performance and capability, and more likely to gain benefit from the standards basis of CD-ROM and CD-R.
Of course, there are many questions that remain unanswered about CD-RW. Of course, CD-RW is a retrofit standard when it comes to CD, since the new phase change-based rewritable discs possess too low a reflectivity to be read by standard CD-ROM drives. In fact, CD-RW discs don't even come close, only holding up, as it were, a distant mirror to the CD specs. But standards, like any good consensual hallucination, are only as real in the real world as we agree to make them. Part of the MultiRead proposal is for adding automatic gain control to the optical pickup to correct this reflectivity problem.
Philips Electronics and Sony Corporation--two of the party of five behind CD-RW's development and market push (the others are Ricoh Corporation, Hewlett Packard Company, and Mitsubishi Chemical/Verbatim Corporation)--have done their part in creating CD-RW as a standard, by writing Orange Book, Part III, which defines CD-RW. If enough drive manufacturers, media makers, and application and operating system software vendors pursue CD-RW products, we can all be talking about CD-RW as yet another CD Book-based standard. I'm pretty sure that's the fundamental mechanism behind standards creation. Standards, when push comes to shove, are really about mutual agreements. Of course, licensing and patents come into play here too.
In fact, some of the opposition to CD-RW probably has more to do with licenses and patents than with technology issues, not that that argument isn't as easily turned around to claim that the current CD-RW effort has plenty to do with Philips and Sony making a move to keep their CD money machine fueled. Phillips Publishing's Optical Memory News--that is Phillips with two "l's," the many-dozen strong electronic media newsletter house and no relation with Philips of the Netherlands--ran an article titled "CD-RW Races to Enter Market before DVD Overshadows It," in which Rich Harada, Panasonic's marketing manager for optical disk systems, admits CD-RW could be a direct competitor to PD.
Harada, whose understanding of the technology and market for optical drives is as strong as is his loyalty to his product line, goes on to dismiss CD-RW as being too expensive: initial models--which also write CD-R--will list for $750 to $1000, compared to around $500 for a PD, which debuted a year and a half ago at $799. And besides, Harada says, Panasonic is concentrating on migrating PD to DVD, a strategy which points to even bigger problems than the ones CD-RW faces: not only is DVD-Recordable not yet fully defined (or available, for that matter, until at best sometime well into 1997), but DVD-RAM--the CD-RW counterpart for DVD, if you will--is so much in the air in terms of specifications that it makes DVD-R look downright complete in comparison.
Now, I very much like the PD drive, and Harada's view is absolutely right that unless CD-ROM drive manufacturers start making MultiRead drives, CD-RW will be no more universally readable than PD discs. But Harada's view is off-target: the target has to be bringing standards to the rewritable compact disc game, and MultiRead sounds to me like it offers the best practical hope. Saying CD-RW may be too little, too late, compared to pushing a proprietary phase-change technology toward an as yet undefined and months-to-years undeliverable high-density target seems more like hoping it won't rain while standing in a river.
Don't worry. We'll see DVD-RAM soon enough. But we can see CD-RW today, and if drive manufacturers will adopt MultiRead, PD's biggest drawback--the lack of standards-based read compatibility--can be avoided by CD-RW. And if the DVD MultiRead solution adresses CD-R's read problems on DVD drives, now that would be a useful migration route to DVD-R and DVD-RAM for you. My read is that MultiRead is a good move for all of us, especially if CD-R on DVD is corrected by it, even if we do get CD-RW, oh darn it, in the process.
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