Hewlett-Packard leads way in CD-Rewritable progress

Imagine one day that you’ll be using the same optical disk for computer storage, playing music and watching movies.But before that day comes, the computer compact disk drive on your computer will become one heck of a lot more useful, with a drive known as CD-Rewritable, or CD-RW.
That announcement came from San Francisco Oct. 22, when five leading high-tech companies unveiled a new specification for a rewritable CD product. Reading like a “Who’s Who” list of players in the optical-disk arena, Hewlett-Packard Co., Mitsubishi Chemical Corp./Verbatim Corp., Phillips Electronics, Ricoh Corp. and Sony Corp. combined on the specifications and technology for the new platform.
“Users have been clamoring the combination of worldwide interchangeability with media rewritablity in a high-capacity storage device,´ said John Boose, general manager of Colorado Memory Systems, a Loveland-based division of HP’s Information Storage Group. “CD-Rewritable fills that void and builds on the existing benefits of CD-ROM and CD-Recordable technologies.”
While computer companies announced that “certain manufacturers” of CD-Rewritable drives are expected to ship as early as next year, many industry experts view it less as a technological breakthrough than an overdue commitment to an industry.
Already a newer, and faster technology, Digital Video Disks, is ready to ship in 1997.
However, an Aug. 26 report, the Optical Data Storage Outlook, authored by Robert Abraham and Raymond Freeman Jr., noted that it will take time until these new drives are able to significantly impact the market.
“The market for optical-disk drives intended for computer use is projected to grow from 41.2 million units in 1995 to 103.5 million in 2001, a compounded growth rate of 17 percent,” Freeman said. “Read-only CD-ROM drives dominate this market today, accounting for 97 percent of optical devices shipped in 1995.”
But, “read-only products will maintain a dominant share, although it will drop to 86 percent by 2001 as multifunction rewritable DVD products gain in popularity.”
Write-once CD drives are already out on the market, but provide fewer options than rewritable CDs, or CD-RW, noted Gary Kaiser, marketing manager of Colorado Memory Systems. CD-RW will give consumers a wide variety of uses such as hard-disk backup, changes to client records and revisions to multimedia projects and proposals.
HP has actually led development of MultiRead and Version 1.5 of the Universal Disk Format specifications, which will make it possible for the read-only CDs and DVDs to read the new rewritable disks. Phillips Electronics has announced it will have significant shipments of CD-RW drives in the first quarter of 1997.
Essentially, HP has two products coming on line that basically fill the same niche.
“We are very enthusiastic about DVD technology at HP, and believe it will achieve great market success,” Kaiser said. “At the same time, our projections show that it will be at least he year 2000 before the computer-connect DVD sales equal those of CD. Therefore we expect a lengthy period of coexistence of the two technologies.”
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