dytcs

I'm very intrested in the Sharp Zaurus SL-C750 you recommended. Though I have both PSP and a PPC, but I do like the good sized qwert keyboard..... but the problem is I don't think I can get one with the price near PSP..... Currently my solution is more 2GB MSPD, or enen 4GB MSPD later.....

Before PSP was released, I was wishing that SONY would use Hi-MD as PSP media format ..... But with the release of UMD format, I'm totally disappointed. I agree that this format was doomed, although it will still alive as the game media, but it will never be UNIVERSAL. If SONY used 1GB Hi-MD, that should be good enough for most games. With the advanced H.264 video codec and ATRAC3 audio codec, 1GB is capable to store up to 4 hours of high quality 480x272 resolution video. (keep in mind that UMD Movie is stored in 720x480 standard DVD resolution, sony want to fight with DVD on big screen??). Both MD and ATRAC would have a brighter future considering 10Millions of PSP hardware sold (if that's the case, we will see a lot of friends playing PSP to borrow recorded MD from us ). The most important thing is, we can write or audios and videos!! Then read only Hi-MD movies and CD quality Audio discs would have stood a much better chance compared with UMD. The only thing sony is worring about is: illegal copy. come on, isn't it easer to download and copy audio/video even games to Memory Stick? PSP is great, and MD is great. SONY screwed them all.

It's intrestig that I was also thinking about vbr when replying the topic I think the reason why VBR is not supported is because MD is positioned as "traditional" recording equipment. To make real time encoding possible on MD recorder, ATRAC used totally different way to process audio data, which makes ATRAC codec good enough on CBR... Just my opinion only:)

That's also the trend I see. Maybe later it will be the same as North America...

SONY China began manufacturing NH1 long time ago. BTW and FYI, PS2/PSP/NDS/IPOD/Imac/thinkpad are all (at least most of the capacity) made in China now....

Well, I think I'm quite agree with you. Of cause MD is expensive, but what worse is SONY gives so many restrictions to MD, result in you paied for the technology, but you can't use it freely, then who want to pay for it? In fact, MD did replaced cassettes in Japan in the 90s. In asian contries, you can still find various of NetMD and Hi-MD units easily in the market place now, and there're also some advertisment you can see in sub-way station. But in US it's totally different. I checked circuit city, radio shark, ultimate electronics without finding the 1G Hi-MD disk. And both circuit city and ultimate electronics is clearancing the last NH-600D for 49.9 USD. Seems like we can only find Hi-MD units on the internet from now on... BTW, I just got 1 NH600D for 49.9USD in circuit city. The release of Sonicstage 3.4 is a best present for me:) I'm now considering to buy a unit with analog recording capability because of the un-limited upload capability.

The ability to transfer back old MD format disc back to PC..... Dreaming I'm just dreaming

I think even in the old days, there's no much complain about LP2, so the 130k Atrac 3 maybe good enough for this bitrate. Although Atrac3+ 64kbps sounds a lot better than LP4, it doesn't necessorily mean that Atrac3+ will also make the same difference on 128kbps. Take WMA for example, 64k WMA is fine compared with 128K MP3, but you won't see 128K WMA works as good as 256K MP3. But if you use simple burner, it's not allowed to rip CD directly to Atrac3 format on a Hi-MD formatted disk....