Last year's DVD craze goes to next level

By ADAM GIFFORD

Last year the DVD player became the fastest-selling piece of new technology ever, with more than 22 million shipped from factories to dealers.

It was little surprise, then, that this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas was awash with next generation DVD recorders and players, and the screens that go with them, as the likes of Sony, Philips and Panasonic tried to sell a vision of the digital home in which people would view a mix of DVDs, broadcast or cable high-definition television and their own home recordings.

For Panasonic, three core technologies - SD flash memory, DVD and digital TV technologies are coming together to provide more value than each can provide alone.

SD seems to be winning the battle for flash memory formats, helped by its adoption in the Japanese mobile phone market, where 50 million phones with SD cards have been sold.

As capacity increases - a 1GB (gigabyte) card should be available by the end of the year - flash memory turns cameras, camcorders, music players and other devices into powerful tools.

Panasonic has already made SD slots available in many of its video recorders and is including an SD Slot in some of its new Viera flat-screen TVs, so users can view and edit their still photos or home camcorder recordings directly on the screen.

It comes at a price though. The 50-inch, high-definition plasma screen, due for release in April, will set you back about US$8500 (12,600).

The 37-inch plasma screen due May will be about US$4000. There will also be LCD screens, ranging from 14 inches to 36 inches.

About 4.3 million flat panel TVs were sold worldwide last year, with the industry expecting that to increase to 14 million units next year.

Panasonic has been pushing to make its DVD-RAM format the industry standard.

While it was successful in Japan, with 71 per cent of DVD recorders sold last year being DVD-RAM, and in the United States, with a 58 per cent market share, Europe was dominated by the DVD+RW format, which took 68 per cent of that market.

A big advantage DVD-RAM has over other DVD formats is the Time Slip function, which allows recording and playback at the same time.

This means you can watch one programme while recording another, or you can come in late to a programme but start watching from the beginning, perhaps catching up by skipping the ad breaks.

It also allows users to edit scenes in any order and to have gapless playback, with no pauses or still pictures between scenes. DVD+RW allows scenes to be deleted, but you cannot change their order.

Panasonic is also putting DVD recorders into its camcorders. It announced two models, the VDR-M70 with 10x optical zoom and weighing 500 grams, and the VDR-M50 with 18x optical zoom and weighing 520 grams. Both cameras will record on 8cm DVD-RAM or DVD-R discs, and also have an SD card for still pics.

DVD-R would be the choice for one-time recording, while DVD-RAM allows multiple recording and quick editing.

For something smaller, the D-Snap camcorders are designed to record DVD quality on to SD cards, so there are no moving parts apart from the zoom lens.

They are small enough to fit into a purse or pocket.

New models to be released in the next couple of months are expected to start about US$300.

* Adam Gifford attended CES as a guest of Panasonic.