🚀 go-pugleaf

Before you buy a rewritable laser video disk you might want to consider one
of the new real time JPEG compression/decompression systems. Fast Forward
Video (800) 755-8463, and Advanced Digital Imaging(714) 725-0154 are
very close to having products for sale. They claim 30 frame per second
compression and decompression at roughly Betacam SP quality, which by the
way is much better than you will get from either the Pioneer or Panasonic
unit. For Betacam SP quality you have to compress at less than a 15:1 ratio
which translates to a 1.5 Mbyte/second disk transfer rate. If you buy a 2 gig
drive you'll be able to get about 20 minutes of video. The board from Fast
Forward Video is supposed to be in the $5000 range. I don't have pricing
information on the Advanced Digital Imaging board.

There are also real time compression boards available from Supermac, Rasterops,
and Digital Micronics, ranging in price from $2500 to $6000. I don't have phone
numbers for these folks so please don't email me asking for that.

I've seen the new DigitalFilm board from Supermac and its video quality was
on a par with what we are currently getting from our Panasonic LQ4000. The
other systems should have significantly better video quality than the Supermac
board because it is currently limited to a minimum compression ratio of 24:1
which is not quite low enough for Betacam SP quality.

Personally I think you'd have to be crazy to buy a laser video disk system
with the prices on JPEG boards so low and going down fast.

-- 
Brian Guenter
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332-0280
Internet: guenter@cc.gatech.edu