By Jean-José Wanègue                 

is it worth to take the risk?  Are you sure that the disc you buy is going to

valuable data. But more importantly is that competition is not only based

urying data for Euro 0.30 a disc
It is obvious that if the market    forecasts    made    by

meet all the performance you have the right to request? May be after reading what follows you will think twice before betting  your  money  and  your

on price. For quite some time now recording speed has become a crit-eria which needs special attention, not only  for  technical  reasons,  but

SMD1 for 2004 will be confirmed with worldwide sales of 12.4 million set-top DVD recorders and 45 million DVD drives for PC to be sold, the consumption of blank media will ex-perience a significant growth to reach 2 billion DVD-/+R disc as compared to 683 millions in 2003. Now set-top DVD recorders are ready to replace our antique VCR (25 years old technology) and in parallel computer programs are more and more dema-nding in terms of capacity as pictures and video have deliberately taken up residence in our computers. So for compatibility reasons and portability reasons recordable DVD’s are becom-ing the media of choice. This recor-dable DVD wave relies on the conj-unction of two classical phenomena. On one hand we have a rapid price decline of the DVD recorder for which average price will be at around Euros 2502, and on the other hand we have the opportunity to purchase blank media at a very attractive price. Actually we can find in the major CE stores an 8x DVD-R in slim case for less than Euros 3.50 but the same disc delivered in cake box of 100 pieces can cost as low as Euro 0.46 when or-dered on internet. According to a representative of the French CE chain store FNAC, 50% of blank discs are now bought through e-commerce. Through this channel you can easily find no-name B grade 8x DVD   for  less  than  Euro  0.30. But  watch  up,

  
INTRODUCTION
4x to 8x to 16x to....

owadays CD-R is unde-niably the most popular media we use to store and distribute digital data. The worldwide demand is reaching about 10 billions units per year. Based on the same technical principles DVD-R was launched shortly after DVD-Video came up for the show. In 1997 Pioneer was the first to offer a DVD-R me-dia with a capacity of 3.9 GB. Later on a 4.7 GB DVD-R app-eared for the great delight of the DVD authoring studios. Although it became available quite late, DVD+R has no cause to be envious of DVD-R, being few months ahead now in the recording speed compe-tition. Originally driven by te-chnical performance, recorda-ble DVD has already entered into mass market where every-body is fighting with aggress-ive price offerings. Just in one year time we went  from  4x to 

8x. In this quest for speed 16x has become the focal point for which many dye and media manufacturers are deploying a lot of efforts. At this speed no mistake will be forgiven. So before enrolling for this race and despite the fact that reco-rdable DVD could be already seen as a commodity product, it is better to understand that high speed recordable DVD is a very challenging media. This is why it is highly desirable to understand how to achieve and control high speed media. So let’s go for a driving lesson to Plasmon which in co-oper-ation with Ciba Specialty Chemicals is offering a com-plete solution for recordable DVD. For this lesson we will get the advice of Tim Parks, Commercial Programme Manager for Organic Media at Plasmon, who specially came back from the Dubai ODS Recording Media Summit
MARCH- APRIL  2005           OPTICAL DISC SYSTEMS

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