Olympus, Sanyo, Hitachi Maxell Unveil MO Disks for Digital Cameras

The following is from Asia BizTech News

July 30, 1999 (TOKYO) -- Olympus Optical Co., Ltd., Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd. and Hitachi Maxell Ltd. unveiled newly developed 50mm-diameter magneto-optical (MO) disks to serve as recording media for digital cameras.

The products comply with the "iD Format" standard, and each has a capacity of 730MB. The three companies intend to commercialize the disks in about a year.

Kyocera Corp., Konica Corp., Nikon Corp., Minolta Co., Ltd. and Ricoh Co., Ltd. have already expressed support for the iD Format which can record about 1,800 still photos, equivalent to 2 million pixels (about 400KB). In the case of animation films of 30 frames/second, it can record about 20 minutes of such film (320 x 240 dots). Also, the disk can support overwrite capabilities.

Olympus aims to further boost the capacity. To do that, it is considering a move to apply the magnetic amplifying magneto-optical system (MAMMOS) and blue-color laser, which would bring about a large increase in capacity.