Read overhere .

Hello Folks,

Isn’t this old news that was reported some time ago?

How does this Sony/NEC agreement interface with the Sony/Lite-On agreement?

Does this optical disc drive joint venture agreement mean that Sony will manufacture NEC optical disc drives or does it mean NEC will manufacture Sony optical disc drives?

Best Regards,
bjkg

I think today they signed a definitive agreement.

Since liteon was making the Sonys it's most likely that Nec will make them now but like the man said where does Liteon fit into this venture? Doesn't sound like a threesome now does it?

I thought they were referring to a joint venture on the new HD and Blue-Ray DVD...not necessarily about normal DVD drives/burners.

Yup, I was under the same impression.

Corporation world is changing quite a lot and everyday.
We've to wait and see how it will affect NEC's drives - will the hardware be the same and manufactured according to the same standards? Will we see them "equiped" in a way they will become "zero sheeps" , ask us to meet certain conditions to play our discs and so on?

The end of Nec for me, Sony is the leading DRM corp in the world. Took them years to include mp3 in their portables, they used their own format with DRM all over it. And don't forget, these are the same guy's that brought us the ever so sweet root-kit. There's simply no telling what they will think up next, but I tell you this for free, it won't be anything to protect consumer rights. Guess I'm grinding it out to the bitter end with my trusted 3500. Just my .02 usd.

Yeah, Sony can't be trusted, wouldn't be surprised if they mess up the future drives. Stamping serial numbers onto every disk burned, (or ripped?), software that emails Sony with every detail of every film you've backed up, and so on...what, me paranoid? Similar things have been done before

Please don't turn this thread into a flame thread against Sony.

My bad ScorpioSoft, maybe I'm overreacting anyway, AFAIK Sony has some sort of deal with Lite-On and those drives are doing just fine!

It's just what you call fine... Don't know about the recent 3 or 4 models of LiteOn, but everything upto the 1653 was crappy one way or the other.

I hope this cooperation means that NEC will still be able to develop and mfg. the drives and that Sony only produces the money and stamp their name on it, nothing more.

Yes, that sums it neatly up for me - fingers crossed!

1. Sony is one of the founding companies behind CD, DVD, and Blu-ray. Otherwise, Sony would have gone bankrupt long ago. (In Asia, Chinese electronics makers are rapidly catching up with and replacing Samsung that has recently become much more successful than Sony.)

2. Lite-On started making some mass-market but low-profit ODDs for Sony as well as for themselves mainly starting from Sony DRU-700A.

3. Sony leads Blu-ray. NEC is one of the two main supporters of HD DVD. They can also combine Sony's optical pickup heads and NEC's LSI's. The combined marketshare of Sony and NEC will make the new venture about larger and more powerful than that of TSST between Toshiba of Japan and Samsung of South Korea. No. 1 is HLDS or Hitachi and LG. (HLDS > Sony-NEC > TSST)

4. Whether NEC makes good DVD writers or not hardly matters in this new venture. What they want is how to maintain and increase marketshare not to be thrown out of the world's increasingly competitive ODD market and how to stay ahead of all the others in future markets of Blu-ray, HD DVD, and more. LG needed Hitachi. Samsung needed Toshiba. BenQ needed Philips. To survive. And vice versa. Those that couldn't find or chose wrong partners had to give up very soon.

5. Whether the new Sony-NEC venture will concentrate on Blu-ray or HD DVD will not be made such an issue in the coming 3 to 5 years or so because neither will lose much whether Blu-ray or HD DVD becomes the one-for-all standard or "dual" drives supporting both blue laser standards become the new standard. I see no reason why Sony now should start designing DVD writers for NEC. The venture will concentrate on how to integrate their technologies in order to lower production cost of their future drives, not current DVD writer drives. Even after starting working with Toshiba, Samsung continues to design many of the recent models of Samsung DVD writers and combo drives (and Toshiba has over 50% share in TSST.)

6. The joint venture will start operation from April 3 because April 1 is Saturday. Let's see what will come out of it. I personally hope to see very light and slim SATA ODD drives for notebooks that can do Blu-ray, HD DVD, DVD DL, DVD-RAM, DVD+R/-R, and CD-R/RW in both NEC and Sony notebooks. Yonah notebooks without Blu-ray and HD DVD are not good enough.