Yet Another Hi-MD Rant

[bobdibest]

What a farse (however that is spelt)

They might aswell remove MD from the equation everywhere but Japan because noone anywhere else would buy one!

I have the MZE10 and instead of upgrading to HiMD I bought an ipod. Why? A million reasons but this is a few:

They are cheaper to buy with storage built in (infact the sony HD5 is only £170 on amazon.co.uk and thats 20gig with player, whilst the gimmicky DH10p is £250 with nothing at all).

Sony has a perfectly good portable video market now, with a disc (UMD) that is an MD in a different plastic case (they removed the sliding metal disc protector is about it), so why have they not combined the two formats? two discs almost the same under one company, both competeing for customers, seems mad to me. If UMD is to work for video and music where MD albums failed sony need more non-psp devices to play back umd for non gamers. So a HiMD/UMD walkman for HiMD recording and UMD playback is a natural progression to be honest

Also the new hard drive walkmans from sony support non-encrypted wma, so why dont the new himd devices? maybe the new european models due soon will, who knows! All I know is sony announced to have connect selling music, movies and music videos asap and its not here yet

If connect sold music, music videos and movies sony would begin to gain an edge. All would be playbackable on a PSP and with last years HiMD players supporting JPEG playback adding MP4 support is kind of a natural progression(esp. as psp supports anyway). Sony keep introuducing new hard drive players with no colour screens when the whole market is saturated with colour screen models now.

Frustration sums it up. All digital cameras shoot movies in mp4 mode or avi mode, so why not support these codecs on other devices capable of holding the data anyway, all hdd and himd players in other words!

ahhhhhhhhh

if sony brought out a new himd walkman which was the screen of the psp but thinner and with himd recording capabilities as well as umd playback and more codec supported id buy back into walkman, as it is ill play movies on the psp and music on the ipod!!!!! this is why sony fail because they cant recognize a consumer market and put out products for that market.

ps when i spoke to sony centres uk they were expecting new models in before the end of 2005. I asked the man if the 2006 walkman range would see new HiMD devices and he said sony were releasing new himd devices by end-2005, which he said with a smile as if he knew something

this is all speculation but hey bring on super himd, 5 gig! now that i would buy

[theblueraja]

ps when i spoke to sony centres uk they were expecting new models in before the end of 2005. I asked the man if the 2006 walkman range would see new HiMD devices and he said sony were releasing new himd devices by end-2005, which he said with a smile as if he knew something

Can you please elaborate on your assumptions? Are you saying he smiled as if you are a loser for considering HiMD because the axe is about to drop, or because 3rd gen is on it's way?

(I can't believe I actually wish to further more rumours & heresay)..

[bobdibest]

hahaha now u mention it, it could have been a 'you loser' smile! but i dont think so

basically ive never had himd so i asked if it copies like any other external storage ie drag and drop, and not like a cd with the laborious task of setting up copy lists etc. he said yes then i said ok well is there a 3rd gen on its way or should I forget md existed and buy hard drive, he said they were expecting 3rd gen

but no other news, its all hear say!

and no i would consider these 2.5 gen basically because they wont export outside of japan and they dont offer any advances on 2nd gen, infact they go backwards! hence the farse

[Richard]

hahaha now u mention it, it could have

and no i would consider these 2.5 gen basically because they wont export outside of japan and they dont offer any advances on 2nd gen, infact they go backwards! hence the farse

How do you know they won't be released elsewhere - all of the 1st gen & 2nd gen models were released in Japan before being released elsewhere. On top of which some 1st and 2nd gen models were never released outside Japan either. (Is the EH-930 therefore a 1.5 generation?)

[bobdibest]

ok to be honest ive lost the 1st, 2nd, 3rd generation plot now! all i know is that new models are coming and models only ever released to the japanese dont count :-)

so nerr to you all

[Gangstah]

if they keep releasing products like this then at this rate theres no doubt that hi-md will be gone...i love MD i have a netMD and I like it much better than any other mp3 player out there...however now people are moving on..ipod has gone to video...smaller size...recording capabilities and MD is still on the old crap....now ipod will come standard with 30GB, whereas MD comes standard with 1GB...they should honesly make a new minidisc that can hold lets say 5GB....and upgrade the DH10P to take videos and play them back on the small screen with recording capabilities...MD has soo much potential..its just that Sony has no freaking clue of what they're doing...as of me rite now..im sticking with my MD because nothing else has impressed me much...im hoping for the best from Sony and I hope they can make these things a reality because ipod is going to crush Hi-MD if sony doesn't do anything logical about it....also they need to reduce the price...the DH10P is 100 dollars more than the new ipod that can do much more than the DH10P...if they can make all of this come true..then im sure ipod will be screwed in the future and we won't every have to post in the thread named "Hi-MD Bye MD"...that's just my opinion..

Edited October 16, 2005 by Gangstah

[bobdibest]

But whether sony can produce walkmans of high quality that have low prices remains to be seen. The technology cannot be that expensive to manufacture anymore, and when the ipod is chromed up walkmans in the same price range are usually plastic!

if sony could sell their 'top range' cd and md walkmans for the price of a 2 gig ipod nano (ie sub £130 as opposed to £260 in the case of the dh10p) then people may look. But will it happen, probably not

ps I wasnt saying himd and umd WERE the same technology, I was suggesting that if a a dvd player plays dvds, cds, sacds, dualdiscs (all of different disc structure), essentially any cd sized disc thrown at it, then why cant an md player play umds? its only a matter of accomodating the different sized casings! the laser would manage to read both fine

ho hum

[Syrius]

^^ For the same reason a CD player cannot read DVD's. It's not forward-compatible.

[Poodle]

It's "farce", by the way...

[Christopher]

Poodle, you troll.

[bobdibest]

ok if we are gonna be picky:

it depends on what way u look at it! if someone added dvd compatability to the discman would you begin calling it a dvd-man or a discman with dvd compatability? sony have released a dvd walkman before that read both dvds and cds (as well as dvd-a)

so my point stands, if you make an md player umd compatable then would you call it a umd walkman that is backwards compatable and reads mds? or like ivebeen saying a himd/umd walkman? the terminology doesnt make a difference, its the fact that it can be done thats important. i think most people understand my point, if a dvd player reads cds, then a umd player with a slightly larger disc loading machanism could potentially read himds! therefore uniting the technology is whats needed! how can umd video ever succeed if the only device they work on is a psp? they wont

and on another note sony need to drop royalties on mds and himds! sell some more units through other companies, make it popular! if sony have the likes of dell, compaq and hp in their blu-ray camp, why not shove a himd drive in every computer sold by these companies too! That way you would have the drag and drop floppy equivalent at a much higher capacity (himd) and the hi-capacity 50 gig bluray discs for movies, games etc etc. essentially replacing the two original drives a computer came with (floppy and cd) for a much higher capacity pair

[anont]

Sony doesn't even have a video-out available for the PSP, there's no way to watch UMD on anything but a 2 inch PSP screen. I can't imagine they'll turn around and start pushing the format strong.

If they were really interested in a combined device, they could have just had the PSP read HiMDs instead of UMD's. About the same size, and 1 Gig is enough for 99% of video games, or for a MPEG-4 movie you intend to watch on a tiny screen (heck 700 meg MPEG-4 movies look OK, even on a large TV screen).

[bobdibest]

Whilst i agree with you on the space required for movies, and the fact that an mpeg4 movie will display 'fine' on my 17" lcd the problem is:

i originally wondered why sony didnt use himd at current or higher capacity for psp, the reason? because umd can be pressed like dvds and mass produced, himd discs need to be recorded and cannot be pressed in the same way! hence they are great for consumer recording but not for mass production

so the umd was neccessary for the psp, plus its smaller! but if umd have films at 1.8gig resolution then they would, i imagine, display 'fine' on an lcd of tv size! (maybe not models larger than 28" however)

anyway, a combined device is wishful thinking as nice as it would be

[ynos]

if iPod or the like has a recording capability (soon...) like hiMD then bbye hiMD and welcome myself to the new age!

[Sparky191]

if iPod or the like has a recording capability (soon...) like hiMD then bbye hiMD and welcome myself to the new age!

Aparently the new 5th gen iPods do have decent quality wav recording. But theres no physical line in. Expect to see a line in dock, and probably a portable dock for a line in soon. You can get a portable line out already for the other models

Edited October 18, 2005 by Sparky191

[dex Otaku]

Sony has a perfectly good portable video market now, with a disc (UMD) that is an MD in a different plastic case (they removed the sliding metal disc protector is about it), so why have they not combined the two formats? two discs almost the same under one company, both competeing for customers, seems mad to me. If UMD is to work for video and music where MD albums failed sony need more non-psp devices to play back umd for non gamers. So a HiMD/UMD walkman for HiMD recording and UMD playback is a natural progression to be honest

UMD is in fact not even slightly related to HiMD or MD.

UMD is a descendent of DVD. It is a stamped, glass-mothered optical disc. Writeable or rewriteable versions of it will either be dye or phase-change material based, as with existing DVD and CD recordable formats.

MD is a magneto-optical format.

HiMD is a hybrid magneto-optical / domain wall displacement format that descended [in part] from it.

The physical differences [read: total incompatibilities at the physical level] are quite stark between UMD and HiMD.

That said, I think it was a bit ridiculous of them to work on both formats at the same time. Sony are, however, a huge company with many divisions doing parallel research with little to no communication between. The two formats are also aimed at completely different markets with completely different usage demands, even if they do overlap in some places.

[bobdibest]

Firstly id like to say the appearance of these forums is changing literally by the minute, one minute halloween then this, then standard! i cant cope

anyway! lol

your point, dex otaku, is a very interesting one! I didnt realise that was the difference between the technologies, so I have learnt something new, thank you

however the age old saying where there's a will, there's a way stands here and if they wanted to they could, im sure of it, combine the two! stranger things have happened after all

anyway, your right, UMD is aiming at the entertainment market whilst HiMD goes pro, but ill be interested to see where HiMD goes, what codec supports are added and what the next gen machines are capable of, as I have not had a new md walkman since buying the e10 and really want one now