2004 International Consumer Electronics Show Coverage

While we're on the subject of proprietary Sony technology, we should take a look at their new HiMD mini-disk format that expands the MD format to a full 1GB of space.

Sony's making a big stink about the new disks and the products that use them, but in reality the market never really accepted MD products to begin with, and this bump up in size is about 2 years too late to actually save the format. IMHO, this one is definitely destined for the business school textbooks, right next to the chapter on Betamax.

Sony Double Layer DVD Burner

While they were making big announcement mentioned above, they also were quietly previewing a very significant breakthrough in DVD recording. Sony's newest prototype DVD burner doesn't even have a model number yet, but looks like it will be a huge winner by adding double layer capability to an already impressive ability to record in every DVD and CD format under the sun.

Since double layer playback is a DVD feature that's been part of the standard since DVDs were invented, and Sony has increased the storage capacity in a way that is compatible with all the existing DVD players out there, consumers will be able to start authoring huge epics without worries about backward compatibility. Good work Sony, this is one breakthrough we really like!

Intel decides to get serious about home entertainment...

President Paul Otellini noted in his keynote presentation that over 350 million digital devices will be sold into the home this year. "The lines between the two industries (computers and consumer electronics) are blurring ... consumers are demanding change inside their homes", he said. Intel announced a non-product called the EPC (or Entertainment PC) which looks amazingly like a TiVo box, or maybe a Microsoft Media center PC without the keyboard. They won't actually manufacture the device, but have licensed the design to several manufactures that will release products by mid year.

They're not stopping there though, as they're also working on getting their chips into digital cameras and video players by 2005. Basically, they're trying to make sure that they don't get left out of an important segment of the future digital economy.

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