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This is very interesting. The format still kicks and everyone knows it!

This is great news. For me the MP3 playback is decent enough. But the improved quality may well be worth an upgrade on it's own. Certainly full transfer access to my old MD collection will be well worth it. Cannot wait. Just give me a deck now Sony!!

The problem I have with HD DVD and Blu-Ray are the fact that for me they are completely unnecessary. I find DVD quality fine for me. The main reason for me buying DVD was not that the quality was better than VHS, but I didn't have to rewind, and tapes wouldn't get sucked up into the machine, and the quality wouldn't deteriorate. But for the industry, DVDs are far too easily copied and ripped off... so enter a new format that's going to be incredibly difficult to crack - but get consumers to adopt it by selling it to them as BETTER QUALITY. The exact same is true of what's trying to happen with SACD for audio. (the cracking will happen eventually I'm sure - BluRay's meant to be more secure than HD-DVD though I think) Add to that, the new HDMI connections which allow broadcasters and studios to prevent content being recorded between the playback device and the display - and it appears they've got it sewn up. Plus it gives retailers an excuse to sell Blu-Ray and HD-DVD at a higher price than DVDs. DVDs - even brand new releases - can now be had for very cheap prices. I predict uptake on both formats will be almost non-existent until the point where you have a unified format player / recorder. The point where I buy an HD disc player, will be when the device is also a recorder and plays both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. And the point when I can bothered enough to upgrade my TV. People are not going to replace DVD technology when it's only been accepted mainstream for 5-6 years. Plus it's reliant on HD TVs being affordable as well. I think the formats will initially take off on computers though as data storage formats. Which Blu-Ray might well win because it can get 25GB of data onto a layer whereas HD-DVD only 15GB. Plus Blu-Ray have now got rid of the stupid cartridge things and might be pretty scratch resistant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#Hard-coating_technology) The ability to backup 25GB of data (or DVD movies downloaded off the internet for free - how funny will that be!) onto a large capacity optical disc is too good for computer people to refuse - I can't wait for that! People also like to back up their movies for playback on their computer, PDA, mobile phone, PSP etc. If HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are so impossible to crack and there's no way for people to do the above with the discs they buy, they won't buy it. And having bought the disc, they certainly won't pay an extra fee to download a version from any official new online services so they can play it on their computer. So my predictions on HD formats? Nothing on the movie buying / consumer front until there are affordable players that play both formats AND affordable HD TVs. I'm going to say 2009 will be when it will really start taking off (this post is on record so come 2009 it will be pretty funny to see how wrong I was ) ... that will only be because new movies are only getting released in HD and not on DVD any more. Long live HD-DVD / Blu-Ray for computer data storage. I don't give a stuff about the formats yet. I enjoy being able to back up my movie and watch it on the PSP and to do that I need the movie on DVD. My final thought on this... What's going to happen to Sony's revolutionary PDD format that noone's heard of :D ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Disc_for_DATA

Now of course if the lights were on at Sony, the PlayStation 3 would have a UMD slot. And therefore be able to play PSP games. And so you could watch your UMDs on the large screen. What the quality would have been like compared to DVD, I can't really comment. UMDs have a capacity of what? 1.5GB something like that? So the resolution of UMD films would look pretty poor compared to DVDs on a big screen. But... Imagine if Sony had used Hi-MD as the disc format. Stick a Hi-MD slot, and a memorystick slot into the PlayStation 3 - and play your Hi-MDs through your TV / surround sound receiver etc. Add a USB connection on the back of the PS3 and... bosch! A Hi-MD deck! Well for Hi-MD playback / PC (+Mac!) transfer purposes with SonicStage anyway. Might have made a decent little media centre that PS3 thing you know! Oh if we'd all been working for Sony over the last 15 years we would have made them billions, and given the world not just good products, but amazing products.

Now if it could play xvid or divx! Imagine a DVD reduced to fit a PSP screen, then whipped into shape with xvid. Sony would never let that happen. But divx and xvid support is now commonplace on DVD players. Ah well.

This was always going to happen. Sometimes I just wonder if anyone has the lights on at Sony. Buying a movie on a UMD, which is more expensive than the DVD version, and can only be played on a small PSP screen? Pfft! For UMDs to be a success, they should have been half the price of the DVD version. I think most PSP owners would buy the DVD and rip it to PSP format, and stick it on the MemoryStick - if Sony made some software to do it all in one go. And I think sony realise that as they're now announcing larger MemoryStick sizes, plus the PSP HDD. And if this Sony PSP media manager software ever happens, I'd hope it's able to rip DVD movies and copy them to the device - much like iTunes does with music to the ipod. Well that's what I'd do with the software. 90% of people don't want to rip the DVD themselves, then re-encode to fit the PSP, then copy it to a memory card. So for those 90% of people, it is just a games machine. But the potential's there for it to be so much more. Same old Sony story People would use it to play movies and tv shows, if it was moron-proof to get them on there. I don't think it's entirely Sony's fault though - there's probably all kinds of legal issues and licensing problems that Sony would have to iron out with film studios if it was to make software to explicitly do this though. For me the balance at the moment is spot on. Rip my DVDs. Re-encode. Copy to memorystick. But probably 90% of users don't know how to do that. That's why itunes and ipods have been such a success with music, because they are moron-proof.

Yep This should be labelled joke, or at least removed from the RSS / news at the front of the site. My RSS reader keeps throwing this up at me and it's freaking me out every time I see it!! :D

Don't do this to me!! :lol:

I would love to see a Hi-MD deck. I'd definitely buy one. Similar to the MDS-JB980(s) I've got, would be good. I've been really happy with the 980, but hardly ever use it now. Only really use it as a DAC! If they priced it around £250-£300 I'd buy it. More than that and I'd wait a year and then buy it. ... or use my credit card and worry about it later! With the release of the MZ-RH1 which can upload old LP, SP, LP2, LP4 from conventional minidiscs, my JB980 might start getting used again! Record on the 980, then upload using the RH1. Annoying, but it would work! Go on Sony - Hi-MD can still go places!!

WOW!!!!! This is just what I always dreamed of!! Shame about the display though - looks pretty small stuck on the side there. Nice EQ on it though. I'd probably use my multi-line RM-MC40ELK for playback. If I ever have a need to get all my old minidisc recordings onto computer then I'm so there with this device. A big round of applause to Sony!!

Unfortunately although the sizes of UMD and Hi-MD are similar, the formats are massively different. UMDs are effectively DVD-based optical media. Which is the reason they were so cheap to produce, and quick to get in to mass production for the PSP. It didn't need investment in whole new mastering production lines etc. MD and Hi-MD are magneto-optical - which is quite a bit different from plain old optical technology in DVDs and CDs. The main difference is not the laser (I think), but the material used for the disk. Magneto-optical media is notoriously slow to write to too - compared to flash memory, magnetic disk platters (hard drives), optical / phase change (CDs and DVDs). More about magneto-optical technologies here... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical What Sony should have done - fair enough, you produce UMDs for games and movies but you would have thought you would make the dimensions similar so a MD / HiMD disk could be read / written to in the same drive. Possibly required an additional laser in the unit for MD / HiMD. Sony must have thought about it - but I wonder why it didn't happen. I guess it could be because Sony really wanted to push memory sticks of various kinds to become the #1 flash card format. Plus 1GB memory sticks are way more expensive than a 1GB Hi-MD disk - which must have been Sony's main reason. Think of the capacity of normal PS1 and PS2 memory cards when they first arrived too - 1MB and 8MB for the PS2. Charge £20 a go for something that every user will need. I guess people might be more tempted to buy a Sony digital camera if they had a PSP as well, so they could view the photos on a larger screen without going anywhere near a computer. Dunno why. But it's a real shame for Hi-MD.

No worries It's been a pleasant surprise to find all these new Hi-MD devices!!!

That's awesome!!! Where can I get one of those???! How much?? Now if it had normal rca analogue outputs for my amplifier... It's so annoying the Hi-MD section of the equipment browser not being up to date. I'd been relying on that thing for my research into the likelihood of a Hi-MD deck recently. Turns out there's an Onkyo model and this thing missing.

I agree with this totally. Remember when minidiscs were first released all the adverts featured active people, snowboard, sandboarding, mountainbiking etc. And I havn't found any DAPs that have been as reliable as my Minidisc players. Many of my mates have had minidisc players in the past, some havn't, and guess which ones are always complaining about their DAPs?! Come on Sony, don't be gits!

Yeah, introducing Hi-MD and having people upgrade their kit, and then to not produce a deck is very annoying. I don't want solid state! I want to have a disc that can be played in a hifi separates system, in a portable, that can hold data as well as music, pretty much bullet proof, and sound great. Hi-MD does all that. I just can't to hear either way - whether it's dead or alive as a technology. Roll on April / May for Sony to make an announcement.

Any reason why the Onkyo MD-105FX isn't mentioned in the equipment browser section at minidisc.org?? The Onkyo MD-133 is. Any ideas?

I just searched for the Onkyo MD-133 to see where and how much I could buy one for. But I stumbled across this article... http://vantechmag.com/bestbuy/index.htm If you search in that page for Onkyo MD-133 you'll notice it says... So then I did a search for the Onkyo MD-105FX in google and found quite a few pictures. http://www.audiocubes.com/images/f_onkyo_md105fxs.jpg Any reason why this device isn't mentioned in the equipment browser section at minidisc.org??

That is true. I remember I went there last year for some information about the ability to edit / divide / combine tracks recorded on a netmd deck in LP4. He didn't have a clue. Yesterday when I went in there one of the blokes was baffling a customer with all sorts of confusing messages about high definition and BluRay. God I'd love to see a Hi-MD deck. Those Onkyo ones - they've existed in Japan over a year I believe. http://www.minidisc.org/part_Onkyo_MD-133.html Are they full-width hifi separates? It looks like it should be part of a micro system of some sort. The audio line inputs / outputs on the back - are they standard RCA phono ones found on amplifiers? Also says it comes with two optical connections - but they must both be inputs, as it says it doesn't have digital output. So with that I'd be able to record linear PCM to a Hi-MD disc, from a conventional amplifier? Then upload and export as a wav with sonicstage 3.4?? And copy mp3 files over to the disc for playback on my RH10 if I want?? And use it as a data drive like my RH10? But it says it doesn't have a USB socket or digital output. The above are features that I thought were standard with Hi-MD units. Right well if Sony don't do anything about a Hi-MD deck, or at least tell us about the possible future of a Hi-MD deck, then I'm getting one of those. I love my MDS JB980s but I so badly want to have a Hi-MD deck connected permanently to my media server computer I've built.

So on the back of the exciting news of a new portable unit for 2006, I thought I'd stop by my local Sony Centre in town and see what they had to say about Hi-MD. There won't be any decks this year, I was told. Or at least they weren't listed in their shop catalogue - the RH1 was listed. The bloke told me how Sony are trying to consolidate their range. I'm really disappointed. Is it worth my while setting up a website to petition for a Hi-MD deck??! Even for another company to license the technology and produce a deck. PLEASE???!!!

Really? ipods are going to support Atrac and FLAC?? Wow!!! What's all this comparing ipods to minidisc anyway? One's a music playback device, minidiscs are primarily a recording device. The only comparisons you can make are on playback quality, or battery life. Atrac wins out on quality with ease. Even compared to a 320kbps CBR mp3. And 15 hours battery on my rh-10 does me for a week. And if it doesn't, I'll just swap in a spare chewing gum battery. Plus my MZ RH-10 cost £160 from amazon last summer, brand new. And records at CD quality.

Hi-MD deck, then I will be happy. A pair of really good quality deck products. One mid-range that retails for $400 (£250) or so. Then another for $700. If this is a rumour, then I'd love to see some rumours about HiMD decks! Loads of people slate minidisc all the time (especially the morons at engadget), but I get the feeling that people don't realise the power of HiMD as a recording format over original minidisc. Personally I love my MZ-RH10. A few Nimh batteries and the external AA battery pack. Add the RM MC40ELK and you're sorted. And a retail price of £160 when I bought mine was amazing!!! MP3 playback / transfer on the RH10 is great for my uses. Linear PCM recording is awesome though. This will be one to look at

Hey there's still hope!! You never know what Sony might have up their sleeves. They must make an announcement in the next couple of months. They'll have to make an announcement of either some new units, or that there's nothing new this year / ever. But I've been getting pretty excited about their new MegaMD format for some time

Is there a link for this site that we can look at yet?

So long as I have a stack of blank discs, access to HiMD discs on ebay, and my MZ RH10 works, then I guess short-term it doesn't matter too much. And when this MZ RH10 stops working, I'm gonna try my best to find a replacement. Such a great device. Best gadget / music purchase I've ever made. I'd just feel sad that other people didn't get to appreciate the versatility of the HiMD format. I mean there was hardly a big fanfare when HiMD was announced!! Ah well - you never know. Sony might have a range of decks ready, a disc capacity increase, digital video cameras recording to HiMD, car head units and everything that they're just waiting to tell us about in April. Or maybe not

I would be absolutely delighted to see a Hi-MD deck. I'd love to be able to play my Hi-MD discs out through my nice amp and speakers. Two decks - one priced around £250, then another priced around £500. Increased Hi-MD disc capacity (2 / 4GB). Then the format can be left to die. There's a market for minidiscs amongst audiophiles, artists, and semi-pro users. Not everyone wants to listen to hundreds of gigabytes of copy-protected, low quality, audio files. Or be a generic london-commuter listening to the new Nora Jones album downloaded from iTunes. I use my Hi-MD discs for general mp3 playing, data storage, and recording. I'd love to see some Hi-MD decks.