Toshiba announced this morning that they've filed a lawsuit against Imation as well as several other manufacturers and distributors of recordable DVD media. According to Toshiba's press release, these companies do not have license agreements with Toshiba or the DVD6C Licensing Group. Toshiba is seeking damages for past infringement and has asked the court to ban the sale, manufacture and importation of recordable DVD media from companies named in the lawsuit.

Toshiba Corporation announced today that on May 14, 2009, Toshiba filed suit in the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin against Imation Corp. (“Imation”), several manufacturers and several distributors of recordable DVD media, as a means to prohibit infringement of Toshiba’s DVD patents. Toshiba’s complaint seeks damages for past infringement and requests that the court enjoin the sale, manufacture, and importation into the United States of recordable DVD media by the defendant companies named in the complaint. The infringing recordable DVD media is sold in the United States under at least the Imation® and Memorex® brand names.

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Despite the growing popularity of on-demand digital distribution, a new report by the NPD Group has revealed that consumers still spend most of their home video budget on buying and renting DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. According to the report, consumers spent 88% on DVD and Blu-ray Disc purchases and rentals with only 12% going toward video on-demand, digital downloads and online streaming.

According to The NPD Group, a leader in market research for the entertainment industry, watching movies and other video content on DVD and Blu-ray Disc (BD) comprises the lion’s share of home-video acquisition and viewing, even as newer digital methods are beginning to gain a foothold in the consumer market. In fact DVD and BD sales and rentals represented 88 percent of consumer spending on home video content, based on a survey that asked about home video consumption over the previous three months.

Results from NPD’s March 2009 update to the “Entertainment Trends In America” consumer tracking study, which provides an in-depth look at shifts in entertainment consumption, revealed that the average U.S. home video consumer reported spending an average of $25 per month on all types of home video purchases and rentals. When it comes to spending on home video content: 63 percent was spent on DVD purchases; 7 percent on BD purchases; 18 percent on DVD/BD rentals from retail stores, subscriptions or kiosks; 9 percent on video on-demand (VOD); and 3 percent on digital downloads and online streaming.

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Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of Flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules, announced it is now shipping its award winning UltraDrive SSDs with Firmware version 1370 which enables improved performance when used with Microsoft® Windows® 7.  Super Talent has made a firmware upgrade tool available at www.supertalent.com to allow existing owners to improve the performance of their UltraDrive SSDs.

SuperTalent has also developed an “UltraDrive Performance Refresh Tool” which users can run to refresh their performance, should they experience performance degradation associated with all SSDs when files become fragmented and data becomes stale.

With the new firmware Super Talent has increased the maximum sequential read speed of both the UltraDrive ME and UltraDrive LE to 260GB/sec max and the sequential write performance of the UltraDrive ME to 200GB/sec max and the UltraDrive LE to 210GB/sec max, delivering the world’s fastest SATA 3Gb/s SSDs in a small 2.5” form factor. 

Buffalo Japan has announced a new 24x DVD writer based on what appears to be a drive design from LG (GH24N?). The Serial ATA equipped DVSM-U24FBS is capable of 24x DVD±R, 12x DVD-RAM, 8x DVD±R DL, 8x DVD+RW and 6x DVD-RW writing speeds and a maximum DVD read speed of 16x. The drive can also upscale standard DVDs to 1080/60p using the bundled CyberLink PowerDVD 8 software. The DVSM-U24FBS will hit store shelves at the end of May for about 5,800 Yen ($60US).