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7th March Media Plant expands CD/ DVDduplication and printing

Local company Media Plant has recently invested in new equipmentand people to meet the growing demand for same day and next day deliveries of duplicated, printed and packed CDRs and DVDRs.

Gary Whitehead has been appointed as production manager, his 20 years experience will enhance both the quality and service provided by Media Plant.“The in-house design capabilities enables us to offer complete service to everyone from advertising agencies, educational bodies and large-multi national companies to promote their goods and services,”said Lee Harris, studio manager.

Media Plant has an incentive running for the months of March and April, with each new account opened and order placed over £150, customers will receive a brandedspindle of either 50 CDRs or 25DVDRs free of charge. Please contact the sales team on01793 498 040.

Media Plant also has a subdivision called Not Another Box thatoffers any form of specialist packaging in materials such as card,metal, polyurethane or polypropylene. Contact Not Another Box buy visiting their website: www.notanotherbox.com

19th February 08: Blu-ray delivers fatal sting to rival in battle of high-definition DVDs

They were at the cutting edge of TV recording when they were launched on a wave of publicity just 14 months ago.

But anyone who splashed out £450 on a state of the art HD-DVD high definition player could soon be counting the cost. Comprehensively outsold by the Sony-developed rival Blu-ray, the Toshiba-backed player is heading for irrelevance, amid growing expectation that its Japanese manufacturer will abandon the technology within days.

An estimated 50,000 HD-DVD players have been sold in Britain — although Toshiba will say only that sales across Europe total 200,000 — as have about 275,000 films. Blu-ray, though, has built up an unassailable lead, with a little over 800,000 films sold in Britain since both technologies were launched. A similar pattern has been repeated globally.  

Toshiba insisted yesterday that “no decision had been taken,” although private briefings in Japan indicated that the cave-in would come later this week. In Tokyo, Toshiba shares increased by 6 per cent, in the hope that it can save $450 million by walking away from its white elephant.

The result is mostly good news for British consumers, except those who bought the equipment. Michael Briggs, principal researcher at Which?, said: “If you haven’t yet bought a high-definition DVD player there is now no more confusion over which format to choose — only Blu-ray remains.” That is expected to lead to a substantial growth in high-definition sales.

Woolworth’s is to stop selling HD-DVDs from early March because customers bought Blu-ray, which outsold its rival “by about ten to one” over Christmas.

Five Hollywood studios back Blu-ray, after Warner Brothers said it would switch to the format at the beginning of the year, leaving HD-DVD owners only with films from Universal, the King Kong studio, and Paramount, home to Transformers.

Alan Wilson, from Romford Home Theatre, a consumer electronics store, which promoted the HD-DVD format heavily online, said: “Warner decided the format war. We sold a lot of HD-DVDs in the early days, but in the last year there was a bit of a stalemate. It’s a shame: you can’t knock HD-DVD in terms of quality.”

Toshiba said yesterday that the players remained “far from useless,” with a library of 800 films available. Its HD-DVD players can help conventional DVD players to “scale up” and play films in near-high-definition quality, and with prices as low as £149 they remain far cheaper than their Blu-ray equivalents. A PlayStation3 with Blu-ray built in costs £279.99.

Blu-ray won because Sony built the player into the PlayStation3 games console. Although Toshiba had support from Sony’s games rival Microsoft, HD-DVD was not built into the Xbox 360, meaning that it was not a default purchase. In America, Blu-ray films are outselling HD-DVD releases by at least four to one; most weeks two thirds of players sold were Blu-ray devices. Blu-ray has built up a similar lead in Japan.  

Source: Times Online

08th January 08: Blu-Ray takes inside edge in war with HD-DVD

Up to 20 firms backing HD-DVD consider defection after Warner opted for Blu-Ray and Paramount is poised to follow

he sprawling consortium of technology and media companies assembled to promote the HD-DVD format of next-generation high definition discs faces a spate of defections to the rival Blu-Ray Disc consortium.

As many as 20 companies currently part of the HD-DVD Promotion Group could be preparing to remove their names from the alliance’s 130-strong membership list, The Times has learned.

Paramount yesterday emerged as the latest major Hollywood studio poised to switch allegiances.

Despite the huge armies of technology companies ranged against each other in the format showdown, Paramount has turned out to be a pivotal figure. Its decision in August to give exclusive backing to HD-DVD was seen as a potentially devastating blow to the prospects of Blu-Ray, and to the strategy of Sony’s president, Sir Howard Stringer.

Sir Howard consistently argued, though, that the Playstation3 games console, which includes a Blu-Ray disc player, would put the format in people’s living rooms around the world more quickly than HD-DVD players would be adopted by consumers. But Paramount, like other members of the HD-DVD group such as Fujitsu, Lenovo and Kenwood, has hedged its bets. It offered exclusivity in August on the basis that it could reverse the decision should Warner Bros switch to Blu-Ray.

The threatened exodus from the HD-DVD format follows last week’s decision by Warner Bros to back the rival Blu-Ray Disc format, whose main technology backers include Sony, Apple and Dell.

One Tokyo-based analyst said that the defections could represent the final nails in the coffin of Toshiba’s HD-DVD standard after a bitterly-fought “format war” that has run for a little over one year.

Eiichi Katayama, of Nomura Securities, said that the battle between the formats, which display films and video games more sharply in an era of ever-growing television screen sizes, was now “entering its final phase”.

Pony Canyon, a major Japanese music, animation and film studio and part of the giant Fuji Television media empire, said that although it was currently part of the HD-DVD Promotion Group, the decisions of US studios meant it would “choose Blu-Ray in the end”.

Several other Japanese firms – including content producers and electronics component makers – said that their support of HD DVD was “under review” and that they knew of many others in the same position. Others, who admitted that they had previously been waiting for “clear market momentum”, said that it had now probably arrived.

Backers of HD-DVD point to the relative ease of producing the discs, and the lower cost of building machines capable of reading them. Unlike previous format wars, particularly the notorious Betamax v VHS skirmish in the 1980s, the war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD has effectively been decided in boardrooms, rather than electronics showrooms. The decisions of the major studios have come well before those of customers, who have generally held back from picking one format for fear of backing a loser.

Facing a future with only Universal Pictures as its major Hollywood supporter, Toshiba and HD-DVD, said analysts at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, could quickly find itself isolated. But HD-DVD does retain a few potential trump-cards, most notably Microsoft. It is the presence of Microsoft on HD-DVD’s list of supporters, say many of the promotion group, that preserves hope that the format could yet prevail.

Source: Times Online

17th August 07: Celebrating 25 years of the CD

Can you believe the CD is now 25 years old? It was 17 August 1982 when the Compact Disc first went on sale around the world – that's 25 years ago exactly!

This is quick shout to say thank you to a format that remains the audiophile's medium of choice.

Holding up to 700MB on a standard disc, the CD ultimately proved a revelation. It works using a 780 nm wavelength semiconductor laser that reads off a disc which stores data using 16-bit PCM coding at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. This all sounds simple enough nowadays, but early – and even not so early – hardware was beset with technical difficulties and sales were crippled by sky-high prices.

Despite this, the format slowly took off thanks to the wildly superior audio quality it offered over cassette tape and vinyl (yes it does, vinyl die-hards!) and the elimination of fast-forwarding and rewinding. From here it spawned a raft of blank media and started its own format war between + and - discs which was only solved when multi-format readers/ recorders became popular.

A quarter of a century the CD is still going strong and it will continue to be a popular format for many years to come.

Happy 25th Birthday to the Compact Disc From Media Plant!!

June 07: New HD Print

MEDIAPLANT working in conjunction with its manufacturing partner has achieved what they are calling “HD Print” to compliment the new generation of HD DVD. This new standard of printing achieves a “photographic” image allowing for excellent reproduction of high resolution images. Contact us for more details.

HD DVD Mediaplant are now able to supply HD DVD discs. The new generation of HD DVD discs have the capacity to store between 15Gb-30GB which is 3.5 times that of a DVD9. This increased storage is the precondition for being able to reproduce programmes with 1920 x 1080 pixels. With the introduction of HD DVD a format is now available to maximise the benefit of HD TV. Contact us for more details.