The Australian arm of electronics giant Philips says that it won’t be selling VCRs any more. Philips seems to be the first of what will eventually be many makers pulling out of the field, although I expect that it won’t happen overnight.
Philips is, of course, behind the ‘+’ family of recordable DVDs: DVD+R and DVD+RW. In conjunction with this announcement, Philips says that it is releasing two new DVD recorders. But one of these is not just a recorder. The Philips LX9000R is a DVD/CD etc system with speakers and the works. And it also records DVDs. I think we can expect to see more such systems in the future.
Two major problems with the VCR have been the bulkiness of the cassettes and the incredible complexity of the players’ mechanisms. Integration of the VCR into other devices has consequently been limited to just a small number of combo VCR/TV models. DVDs, though, whether recorders or players, are mechanically the same as CD players. They just have different lasers and software. The rapid price falls in DVD recorders (likely due in large part to the development costs being paid off) ensure that disc players/recorders will likely become ubiquitous over the next few years.
The price drops don’t look like ending in the near future:
SCOTT HOUSLEY [Senior Product Manager of DVD and Audio at Philips]: Probably in the next 12, certainly within the next 12 months at least a 50 per cent decrease in the price of them from where they are today. They will halve and that’s due to very quick global uptake at the moment.
I still don’t expect the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ division to result in a Beta vs VHS style format war. The more likely resolution will be true multiformat DVD recorders. It’s not like the discs themselves are physically different. Already Sony’s models support DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD+RW, while Toshiba’s model supports DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD-RAM.