Taiwanese manufacturers are looking at higher DVD recording speeds

November 3, 2003

The past has shown us one new
rule, once the Taiwanese get their hands on technology, the prices drop
dramatically. Currently the Japanese (NEC, Sony, Sanyo) and European (Royal
Dutch Philips) companies are mainly in control over the DVD market because they
provide the technology and set the standard for quality.

But according
to an article in Digitimes now also the Taiwanese have gotten their hands
on the technology and Taiwanese chipset manufacturer MediaTek is already making
DVD recorder chipsets, a market formerly mainly dominated by e.g the companies
mentioned before. While the market for 2x, 4x and 8x chipsets was mainly
dominated by Japanese companies and Philips, for 12x and 16x MediaTek might
become a big rival for them.

After
successively rolling out their 8x DVD+RW models in September and October,
leading companies BenQ, Lite-On IT, and Quanta Storage immediately
followed with 8x DVD-dual drives. The products are presently shipped
mainly to small- and medium-sized vendors in North America and Europe.
Taiwan manufacturers still trail Japanese companies by one to two months.
But the gap is already much narrower than the one to two quarters when
they started delivering 4x models.

These companies, as well as Behavior Tech Computer (BTC) and
Accesstek, now keep just one R&D team to develop and fine-tune their
4x and 8x products. The majority of staffers are assigned to speed up the
development of 12x and 16x drives. Taiwan suppliers were forced to play
the catch-up game in the shipment of 8x drives mainly because the
designations of specifications were still controlled by leading European
and Japanese optical drive manufacturers, which instantaneously started
mass production after completing the setting of specifications.

Although Taiwan's chipmaker MediaTek has recently started
delivering chipsets for 8x DVD drives, it still lags behind multinational
suppliers like Philips, NEC, and Sanyo. However, DVD drive makers in
Taiwan stressed that they and MediaTek have all transferred focus to 12x
and 16x models in order to make a big leap past competitors in other
countries. Most of them think DVD drives, just as shown in CD-RW drives,
will have 16-speed as the ultimate
model.

The article also reports that altough some important component are still in
control by Japanese companies, the Taiwanese supplies have gained a strong
competitive position because of their experience with CD-RW drives and also one
year of making DVD drive. This should make sure that mass production should be
easier and faster to set up. All with all enough reason to predict that prices
of DVD recorder might drop a lot more the coming months. Read more here.

Source: Digitimes.com