Toshiba gets it on with HD-DVD discs mass production

The confrontation between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray seems to have finally reached an end. And for the moment Sony is loosing ground, as Toshiba and a group of Japanese companies announced that they have developed the prototype of a recordable HD-DVD disc that can be manufactured on existing DVD-R production lines.

Toshiba is positive that Hitachi, Maxell and Mitsubishi, who have already tested the technology, will be ready to manufacture HD-DVD discs on a large scale by the spring of 2006.

That is the moment when Toshiba intends to launch its first HD-DVD and first PC drives on the market.

The HD-DVD-R discs will have about three times the storage capacity of today's DVD-R discs and Toshiba also intends to introduce 20 GB HD-DVD-RW disc about the same time, next year.

Although nothing has been said about pricing, the backers of HD-DVD format want to offer the write-once discs at lower price than the HD-DVD-RW discs.

"HD-DVD's basic feature of sharing the same disc structure as DVD made a large contribution to this success and offers more and compelling evidence of our design policy's validity," said Hisashi Yamada, chief fellow of Toshiba's Digital.

Before the disc manufacturing companies can gear up for production, the HD-DVD-R specification needs to be finalized by the DVD Forum, the standardization authority for the DVD format. This should be done within the next two months, according to Junko Furuta, a spokesperson for Toshiba.

The discussions with Sony about a unified DVD format are closed, according to Toshiba Corporate Senior Vice President Yoshihide Fujii. "The 0.1-millimeter format seems impossible now," he added, referring to the Blu-Ray optical cover layer thickness.