January 27, 1998 (TOKYO) -- Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. said it would delay deliveries of its LF-D100J DVD-RAM drive, originally planned on Jan. 20, until the middle of April.

The drive has attracted attention as a very large capacity media that can be bundled with MPEG1 image compression and editing software.

Delivery was extended because of the delay in verifying the image processing software for the drive as well as the need to reexamine recording functions of the data.

According to Matsushita Electric, performance was lower than expected when recording massive amounts of small-capacity files. "We did not have enough technological know-how regarding recording by universal disk format on DVD-RAMs," a company spokesman said.

The LF-D100J is aimed at general users, so it requires operating verifications on several personal computer platforms.

However, the company did not finish the verifications, so it delayed shipments.

Matsushita also said it would extend deliveries of 2.6GB and 5.2GB DVD-RAM disk media, originally planned along with the DVD-RAM drive, until the middle of April.

The delivery schedule of internal DVD-RAM drives for personal computer manufacturers, scheduled to start in February, also has been delayed.





(Nikkei Multimedia)