A letter to sony regaurding UMD's

[Cap'n 1time]

also umd's will certainly not replace CD-roms. CDroms were the digital media standard from about 1983-1997 and are still one of the most common media types used by the Music Industry. They are cheap, effecient, easily manufactured and reliable. besides.. how many millions people own cd players or have cdroms inside their computers? and how many millions of people play DVDs through DVD players or DVD-ROM drives? Now if UMD devices cost around 150-200% more than modern media devices how many people are going to trade in their reliable machines for this new technology that no one except psp users care about?

thats right. nobody.

[RedKing14CA]

sony said its cheaper to manufacter them than cd's... but they also said home brew would render your psp useless..

[Kaiser]

sony said its cheaper to manufacter them than cd's... but they also said home brew would render your psp useless..

Yup. There is a lesson to learn from this, never trust Sony. I mean the Playstations 1-3 were hyped beyond imaginable. The Mini-discs,beta players and ATRAC CDs were all hyped, expensive and failures. Makes you sick after awhile thinking about all the Bull$#@! Sony force-feeds you.



( TOY STORY IN REAL TIME ON TEH PS2 )

[RedKing14CA]

yeah, i hate sony, but nintendo has failed me, now in both the handheld and home console area... they came out with the virtual boy, and it all went to hell from there....

(toy story? huh?)

[Kaiser]

Hell I like Sony (Quality products for the most part) .I just don't trust anything they ever say.

[Cap'n 1time]

Hell I like Sony (Quality products for the most part) .I just don't trust anything they ever say.

thats probably the best way to look at it. pretty much everything (excluding their game hardware) is pretty well made. the price is a totally differant story though....

[RedKing14CA]

aha, price... yes, i suppose you kinda get what you pay for... to bad i couldnt pay for a better screen.... the display itself is beautiful, but the plastic is like... its like they used the stuff in air cleaners that dust CLINGS to, and made it extra soft, for scratches!!!

but back to UMD's, why are CD's so populaur ya think?

and in what ways are UMD's better than CD's?

[Buckaroo_Bonzai]

Yup. There is a lesson to learn from this, never trust Sony. I mean the Playstations 1-3 were hyped beyond imaginable. The Mini-discs,beta players and ATRAC CDs were all hyped, expensive and failures.

Actually mate, Minidisc recorder/players were pretty affordable not too long ago ('round '02) if you went with a budget unit. One might also argue that it had a rather good run in Sony's native country of Japan up until recently. (No arguement as to whether it was a failure over in North America. :P)

Also, it's worthy to note that "ATRAC CDs" were merely user burned CD-Rs using SonicStage for use with Sony's discmans that were ATRAC compatible. Not really on the expensive side unless you're used to buying portable CD players for under $100 USD.

You also forgot about Sony's other soon to be failures: Super Audio CD (SACD) format as well as their "newest" incarnation of the CD, the Dual Disc. (Which refuses to play the CD side in nearly all my CD players, most of which are Sony. )

Anyways, UMD does sound like a good portable replacement for the audio CD when you look at it: 1.8 GB capacity, hard shell for protection, smaller size means smaller portable devices.

That is not enough to even mess with the current audio format king. (CDDA) It looks good when mobile, but is there a reason to chose it over the current standard at home? Two formats (one portable, one not so portable) for audio simply would not fly.

Look at the Minidisc: A compact disc in a protective shell that enables a user to write and erase up to (so sayeth Sony) one million times. Stored audio data digitally, albeit compressed. It was marketed as a replacement for the cassette, but if I was to walk into a London Drugs, which one has the better chance of being found?

[RedKing14CA]

simply would not fly having two? um, dude, do you know what REPLACEMENT means? like records... were replaced by tapes, and tapes with cd's and cd's with? (UMD?)

(video is another story)

video i beleive started like the radio n such, without any tapes or anything, and then went to tapes, then to DVD's... and it wont go to UMD

edit- all sony needs to do is make a burner, and burnable UMD's... and a UMD player...

[Buckaroo_Bonzai]

simply would not fly having two? um, dude, do you know what REPLACEMENT means? like records... were replaced by tapes, and tapes with cd's and cd's with? (UMD?)

Oh no mate, I understand what the word means quite well. Thanks for checking. Also FYI friend, records were NOT replaced by cassette tapes, they were a portable supplement. I don't think any of my friends threw their LPs out of the window once pre-recorded cassettes came out.

What I'm saying is that at this point in time, replacing CDs in the HOME is just not required. It's not necessary. For a portable aspect, it sounds like it could be a replacement as the discs are more armoured than normal CDs.

It has no benefits in the home. Forget the 1.8 GB size. Mind you, that's DUAL LAYER. CDs are 700 MB and single layer.