And the Philips Digital Compact Cassette (DCC), a mid-1990s Mini-Disk competitor. I've NEVER met anyone who would admit to having owned one of these players...
Both DCC and S-VHS offered 'minor' technical improvements, but made only limted market penetration. And so most pre-recorded media continued to be released in the slightly inferior but much more widely consumed formats of their respective predecessors. (R.I.P.)
The problem is that the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs themselves need to be backward compatible, not just the players. Then HD-DVDs would play in standard definition on (single standard) Blu-Ray players, and vice versa; and both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs would play on existing players (albeit in standard definition). Plus retailers would not need to stock, e.g., both standard definition and Blu-Ray versions of the same movie.
I have three dvd players and three PCs with dvd drives, in a total of three rooms; there is NO incentive for me to buy one high definition player plus any high definition only dvd discs becuse I will not be able to watch those discs in the other two rooms, or on my laptop in an airport. Without the availability of hybrid standard-/high-definition dvd discs, I expect I'll wait until I've had to replace at least two dvd players through 'attrition', and all new players playback both high definition formats, before I start buying high definition dvds.
Of course it's obvious why there are no hybrid standard-/high-definition dvd discs: if they existed there would be no incentive for accelerated replacement of existing dvd players with high definition models. But it looks to me that the limited number of hybrid cd/SACD or cd/DVD-Audio discs killed the move to multi-channel audio, so high definition dvd marketers beware!
I think this is probably another good idea/product in search of a user.
Unless you plan to use these 32MB floppies for storage/archive (instead of CD-R/W), the best use is for 'SneakerNET'. But would you rather pay $85 per PC for a new 'UberFDD' or $20 for a 100TX network card which will make the data transfer a lot faster (and probably more reliably!)
My wife owns ONE floppy which she uses to carry files between our home network and her office network. And most of the (say) 100 floppies I used last year were install disks (for products which really insist on installing from floppy), or "recovery" disks (thank you Microsoft! -- for leaving the Boot to REAL DOS prompt option out of Windows Me...)
I got an LS-120 drive [and THREE 120MB SuperFloppies a few years ago], but now I really only use it as a 'slightly higher speed' boot drive on the PC I reconfigure frequently [and so boot from floppy most often.]
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And the Philips Digital Compact Cassette (DCC), a mid-1990s Mini-Disk competitor. I've NEVER met anyone who would admit to having owned one of these players...
Both DCC and S-VHS offered 'minor' technical improvements, but made only limted market penetration. And so most pre-recorded media continued to be released in the slightly inferior but much more widely consumed formats of their respective predecessors. (R.I.P.)
The problem is that the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs themselves need to be backward compatible, not just the players. Then HD-DVDs would play in standard definition on (single standard) Blu-Ray players, and vice versa; and both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs would play on existing players (albeit in standard definition). Plus retailers would not need to stock, e.g., both standard definition and Blu-Ray versions of the same movie.
I have three dvd players and three PCs with dvd drives, in a total of three rooms; there is NO incentive for me to buy one high definition player plus any high definition only dvd discs becuse I will not be able to watch those discs in the other two rooms, or on my laptop in an airport. Without the availability of hybrid standard-/high-definition dvd discs, I expect I'll wait until I've had to replace at least two dvd players through 'attrition', and all new players playback both high definition formats, before I start buying high definition dvds.
Of course it's obvious why there are no hybrid standard-/high-definition dvd discs: if they existed there would be no incentive for accelerated replacement of existing dvd players with high definition models. But it looks to me that the limited number of hybrid cd/SACD or cd/DVD-Audio discs killed the move to multi-channel audio, so high definition dvd marketers beware!
I think this is probably another good idea/product in search of a user.
Unless you plan to use these 32MB floppies for storage/archive (instead of CD-R/W), the best use is for 'SneakerNET'. But would you rather pay $85 per PC for a new 'UberFDD' or $20 for a 100TX network card which will make the data transfer a lot faster (and probably more reliably!)
My wife owns ONE floppy which she uses to carry files between our home network and her office network. And most of the (say) 100 floppies I used last year were install disks (for products which really insist on installing from floppy), or "recovery" disks (thank you Microsoft! -- for leaving the Boot to REAL DOS prompt option out of Windows Me...)
I got an LS-120 drive [and THREE 120MB SuperFloppies a few years ago], but now I really only use it as a 'slightly higher speed' boot drive on the PC I reconfigure frequently [and so boot from floppy most often.]