Optical Disc Products Little Rock AR

As a prelude to the selling season, it is appropriate to describe what is becoming a red-hot product category on a number of fronts: optical disc products.

It's all too easy to only consider "DVD," but that is a bit too limiting. After all, it isn't just DVD players anymore. Depending on your vendor line card, you may sell not just "movie players," but DVD recorders in one of three main formats, high resolution audio players, and products that combine any of the above with hard drives. Add in to the mix some products that are strictly hard-drive-based and you quickly see how broad the market can become.

Before getting to the specifics, it is important to note that despite the availability of the latest "Special Edition" Terminator 2 DVD with a high-definition version on the disc, it is still likely to be at least two years before we see any BluRay products in the North American market. It is similarly unlikely that we'll see any other blue laser product before that time.

Competing with blue laser-based products as a potential DVD carrier for high-def optical disc products are a variety of proposals that utilize advanced compression technology to squeeze enough data on to a disc using the current red-laser DVD technology so that an HD movie can fit on a single disc. Some proponents see this as competitive to blue laser, others see it as complementary. Regardless, given the extensive political wrangling going on at the same time as the scientists work to prefect everything, it is unlikely that we will see any of these other formats in place as a viable HDTV carrier any time soon.

Where does that leave you this year? First, you may rest easy that there will be no new format coming into play for a while that will make obsolete the products you have just sold and installed. Second, the parties to almost all of the formats have stated that backward compatibility is essential. That means that the discs (both DVD and CD) that your clients purchase today to play on the players you have sold them will also play on any future machines. Indeed, though the formats and disc technology may change, it seems probable that the same Dolby Digital and DTS audio formats in use today will carry forward to any of the HD formats. This is an added measure of forward compatibility, again eliminating any problems for clients who are obsolescence phobic. So if you won't have HD-DVD players this year, what will you have? Particularly when any consumer can purchase a DVD player today, albeit one with quality that might not look good on a large-screen display, for less than the price of some DVD "Special Edition" disc sets, it is important to differentiate your offerings from the "big box" stores.

One way to do this is to look beyond mere progressive scan outputs to players with more advanced video processing and post-processing technologies. In some cases this will come through the use of a post-processing chip while in others it will come from the design of the ...

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