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- Optical Storage
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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- Flash Memory
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.
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- Software
Nero, creators of liquid media technology, today announced that Nero MediaHome Essentials software will be bundled with the LG BD390 Network Blu-ray Disc Player. Nero MediaHome represents the Nero vision for easy creation and distribution of content anytime, anywhere and on any device and was designed to help consumers enjoy digital media throughout their connected home networks. The integration of Nero technology with the LG BD390 player provides a new level of user experience, allowing consumers to easily and wirelessly stream all their photos, audio and videos from a PC over their network to the LG Network Blu-ray Player.
The LG BD390 Network Blu-ray Disc Player offers consumers broadband connectivity and advanced audio capabilities with audio format decoding for formats such as Dolby TrueHD/Digital Plus and DTS-HD with a clear auditory experience. It also features integrated wireless home networking for easy connection to the home network. The 1GB of built-in memory gives consumers an option for enjoying BD-Live content from their favorite Blu-ray movies without the need for an external flash drive. In addition, the LG BD390 offers discrete 7.1 channel audio outputs for exceptional connectivity and performance.
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- Home Entertainment
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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- Hard Disks
Addonics Technologies today announced a family of RAID enclosures built on Addonics’ tower platform and integrated with a combination of Addonics’ snap-in mobile rack, disk array, drive cartridge system and port multiplier. The new towers include the RAID Tower Mini, the RAID Tower II and the RAID Tower IV.
Each RAID Tower model comes bundled with everything needed to connect the drives to a PC or laptop. You can start with as little as one drive and expand to more capacity by adding more drives at a later time. On some RAID Tower models, you can mix and match different type of drives, all in the same RAID Tower unit, such as 3.5” SATA or IDE hard drives, 2.5” SATA or IDE hard drives or even a SSD (Solid State Drive).
Depending on the type of the built-in port multiplier inside the RAID Towers, the drives inside can be set up as an individual drive or to form a simple RAID 0 or RAID 1 to RAID 5 with hardware acceleration for fast read/write performance. Once the drives are configured, they can all be connected to a system via a single eSATA or USB connection.
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- Flash Memory
Patriot Memory, a global pioneer in high-performance memory, NAND flash and computer technology, today announced the release of their "value add" bracket to be included in all future Warp and Torqx SSD drive purchases.
SSD drives have been predominately associated with mobile laptop computers. With 3.5” desktop drive bays, the standard SSD size of 2.5" is not currently an option for desktop owners. The Patriot SSD bracket clears that hurdle for desktop owners.
"Consumers are looking for options; our goal is to give them that opportunity to add new technology," says JR Wakabayashi, Patriot’s Marketing Manager. "By including the SSD bracket in all SSD purchases for the Warp and Torqx series, Patriot makes SSD an attractive choice for overclockers, gamers, and PC enthusiasts; a definite 'value add' for all consumers."
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- Optical Storage
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).
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- Optical Storage
Plextor Japan announced this week that it will be releasing an external version of the PlexWriter Premium2 in early June. The Premium2U reads and writes at 52x, rewrites at 32x and sports an 8MB buffer. The drive also supports Yamaha's Audio Master Quality Recording system as well as many of Plextor's advanced technologies, including GigaRec, VariRec and Q-Check.
Plextor has not announced a price yet. However, the Premium2U is expected to run about 19,980 Yen ($207US). While I can't see myself dropping that sort of cash on a CD writer based on a three year old drive design, there are probably plenty of Plextor fans and audiophiles out there that will.
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- Home Entertainment
Denon Electronics, one of the world's premier manufacturers of high-quality home entertainment components, today introduced two high-performance Blu-ray products, each designed to make the benefits of high-definition video and audio more available and affordable. The company's new Blu-ray offerings include two Profile 2.0 Blu-ray players, the DBP-2010CI (SRP: $699) and DBP-1610CI (SRP: $499.) Both are scheduled for July 2009 availability.
Denon's new Models DBP-2010CI and DBP-1610CI are both geared for use in today's most advanced integrated home entertainment systems. Among their innovative interactivity features, both include built-in BD Live and Bonus View functionality. For easy connectivity to both a host of current-day and future entertainment enhancements, the new models both feature onboard Ethernet port that allows for Internet connectivity for BD Live and firmware updates. Adding to their video handling capabilities, both models offer DivxHD playback and support AVCHD playback from BD discs made from HD camcorders.
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- Flash Memory
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology solutions, announced shipment of its 32-Gigabyte (GB) moviNAND™, the highest density embedded memory card utilizing advanced 30-nanometer (nm) class process technology. Use of high-density embedded memory improves the performance of high-end phones and other mobile consumer electronics when processing and storing large amounts of multimedia content such as videos, video games and TV broadcasts.
The 32GB moviNAND is the first embedded memory card to use 32 Gigabit (Gb) NAND devices produced with 30nm-class process technology. The new Samsung card doubles the density of the previous generation of moviNAND that is now being produced with 16Gb 40nm-class NAND chips.
