slothrop

It was the price as well as the packaging. I paid £9.99 for a three pack of these discs and assumed (especially given the packaging) they had to be the 1Gb discs due to the massive price differential over regular 80 minute discs (by comparison I picked up a pack of 10 yesterday for £6.99). Oh well live and learn...

Am I alone in finding it a little off for Sony to be boxing up three ordinary 80 Minute MDs together and plastering HI-MD logos and "13.5 hours of music" all over the boxes and selling them for almost 5 times the price of regular 80 minute MDs which can, of course, be formatted to Hi-MD mode in about 20 seconds. I bought a pack of these assuming they'd be the 1Gb discs (which don't seem to be available at all in the UK) and was most upset when I got home (although the packaging is technically correct it is, I believe, misleading as you have to read it very carefully to understand what you're getting and, in the UK at least, these packs are being kept behind the counter with the Hi-MD players rather than on the shelves with the other recordable media so the sort of close examination required is difficult). I'm guessing from the shortage that Sony are having production difficulties with the blank 1Gb discs but this sort of cynical opportunism has really soured me on them. I've been using MD players as my personal stereo format of choice for about six years now with my MZ-NH900 being my fourth unit. While it's a fantastic machine (and I fully agree with everybody whose said that the digital amp is a massive improvement over everything that's come before) Sony do seem to have mesed up the launch.