Slashdot Mirror
New Sony Minidisc Players
Andy_R writes "Sony's has announced it's new new range of Hi-MD players at the CES show. The range of players (which should hit the shops in April) will start below $200 for a device that can function as a USB hard drive as well as storing a claimed 45 hours of music. The twist is that the data is stored on a new type of removable 1Gb media, a development of the minidisk format, with blanks costing about $7 each. The BBC have some more details including backwards compatibility with old-style minidisks and an ominous mention of 'built-in copyright protection' but I can't find anything on Sony's official site yet." Another reader reader submitted some pictures and specifications (pdf).
Finally being able to use MDs as removable media is really great. I remember hearing about a drive for the old MDs that was intended for using them as data storage, but I've never seen one.
These new MDs coul be a viable replacement for CD-roms, but only if they aren't bogged down with DRM. A physically small, 1GB disc in a protective caddy. It's almost too good to be true.
Eat the rich.
DAT is a ten year old perfectly good technology. I defy anyone to walk into a mall and find a DAT device, a Digitam Minidisc, or a host of others. People simply won't buy a crippled product, therefor an entire decade of technologies were exterminated. This is what happens when the law attempts to impose DRM.
litigious bastards
suck it sco!
Why? Because those HDD mp3 players (nomad, ipod) have crap for battery life. Portable mp3 CD players are nice but don't fit in my pocket nicely like my NetMD. Minidiscs are also more robust than CDRW for carrying around and re-writing to. Plus you don't need a computer to record.
I'll admit that Sony did practically destroy it's own creation with all of it's annoying restrictions including the inability use the media as data storage. It would have made the perfect replacement for the floppy disc, zip disc, etc.
The US portable audio market is dominated by HDD/Flash players, MD has never become a big player in the US except for audiophiles and digital recording. It is a big thing in Japan, I was there recently and MD is the primary portable audio hardware. From Sony's report they are expecting to ship 8M units of the physcal year almost half going to the Japanese market. So before you dismiss MD as an also ran, there is a large market. For DRM issues, the format does not allow second generation digital copies to be made, that means that you can't copy music digitally from MD. Its not actually that big of a deal since most MD recorders/players do not have digital outputs, then again neither do most HDD/flash based players.
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I think the more important underlying issue is that we slashdotted Sony's web site (the one with the pictures). Seriously, this is Sony we're talking about here... WTF?
Quite a lot:
* iPods have poor battery life compared to the NetMD and Hi-MD units (8 hours spec-sheet vs. about 30)
* iPods can't record - only accept uploads.
* iPods are HDD-based, so less resilient.
* NetMD players are smaller and lighter than even the iPod mini so I would expect the trend to continue with the similar sized Hi-MD walkman.
* The Hi-MD walkman is the first to support PCM recording - while the iPod can play back PCM wave files, the Hi-MD walkman can also record them in realtime, effectively a pro-sumer solution to the bulky and expensive DAT format.