TOSHIBA INTRODUCES FIRST-EVER LINE OF DVD PLAYERS…. MOVIES AT HOME WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN!; Hundreds of Movie Titles on DVD from Major Studios to Accompany Player Roll-Out This Fall

Business Wire, Jan 4, 1996

WAYNE, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--January 4, 1996--In one of the most significant and far-reaching product announcements ever made in the consumer electronics and entertainment industries, Toshiba America Consumer Products today unveiled two high-performance DVD players -- Models SD-3006 and SD-1006 -- slated to be introduced in the Fall of 1996. Key to the revolutionary impact of DVD is the system's ability to deliver more than 2 hours of super high-quality digital video playback and breathtaking Digital Surround Sound from a single side of a 5" optical disc. Simultaneous with the Fall introduction of Toshiba's first two DVD players will be hundreds of movie titles on DVD from major Hollywood studios.

The leader in digital video technology, Toshiba's pioneering effort in DVD has been a major focus for the company, which committed more than 100 engineers to a massive two-year research and development project. Equally important was Toshiba's work with the entertainment, consumer electronics and computing industries. From the outset, Toshiba recognized the importance of a single global standard for the DVD format, and together with its strategic partner Time Warner, led the cross-industry alliance that established the unified DVD standard.

Toshiba DVD delivers an unprecedented level of video quality -- with resolution and color purity exceeding laserdisc and professional studio masters. Its playing time of 133 minutes on a single disc side is sufficient to handle 94% of all feature-length films. Enhancing its appeal as the ultimate home theater component is DVD's extraordinary audio capabilities, supporting 6-channel discrete Dolby Digital Surround Sound, Dolby Pro Logic and high-fidelity stereo. DVD discs store more than 4.7 Gigabytes of information -- seven times the capacity of a current Compact Disc or CD-ROM.

To satisfy the goals established by the Hollywood Digital Video Disc Advisory Committee -- including video quality exceeding that of laserdisc and sufficient capacity to accommodate an entire feature film on a single disc side -- Toshiba developed several key new technologies. Drawing on its capabilities as a designer and manufacturer of integrated circuits, Toshiba was the first to create an LSI chip designed specifically for real-time decoding of digitized motion pictures compressed to the MPEG-2 standard. In addition, Toshiba developed the first-ever red semiconductor laser, whose shorter wavelength (650 nm) is critical in resolving the finer, more densely packed data pits on the DVD disc.

Most fundamental to the development of DVD was the need to increase the data-storage capacity of a 5" optical disc. Toshiba's solution was the creation of a new bonded disc. A 1.2 mm-thick DVD disc is comprised of two separate 0.6-mm thick discs bonded together back-to-back. This means that on the data-bearing side of the disc, the light from the laser pickup travels through just half the substrate thickness of a regular CD. The resulting benefit is that the DVD disc is more resistant to errors caused by slight tilting relative to the laser pick-up. This allows DVD discs to be mastered with significantly finer high-density data tracks and read with great precision by a shorter wavelength (650 nm) red laser. Toshiba also incorporates advanced Reed-Solomon Product Code (RS-PC) error-correction to the DVD system, further enhancing the format's performance and reliability.

DVD Means More Flexibility And Interactivity

In addition to its unprecedented video and audio playback capabilities, Toshiba DVD offers users a new level of flexibility in home entertainment. During playback of movies, DVD discs have the capability of providing a choice of viewing options. There's standard 4:3 pan-and-scan viewing -- the way most movies are displayed from broadcast and tape sources. Or press a button on a Toshiba DVD player's remote control and you can view the action the way the director intended -- letterboxed for viewing on a big screen TV. There's even a special anamorphic mode designed to provide high resolution pictures on today's advanced widescreen (16:9) sets.

DVD creates a myriad of opportunities for movie producers and multimedia software providers to add extra features. For instance, DVD movie discs have the capability to present soundtracks in eight different languages, and up to 32 distinct subtitles. Movie producers even have the ability to include multiple story lines on one DVD disc, allowing the viewer to determine the outcome of the plot in a truly interactive way.

Another welcome feature of the new Toshiba DVD players is the flexibility of a built-in parental control system. With a Toshiba DVD player, a parent selects the ratings version to be viewed -- PG, PG-13, R or NC-17 -- and the player automatically shows a version of the movie edited to that ratings level by the producers of the film.

Most exciting is the future potential of Toshiba DVD in a broad range of multimedia and computer applications. Because Toshiba DVD consists of a suite of disc types -- each with increasingly higher storage capacities -- the format holds tremendous growth potential for data-intensive home and business applications.