Crossing The Data Line
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday October 21, 1990
COMPACT Disc Interactive (CD-I), a new twist to the digital disc theme, had one of its first public showings at the Tokyo Electronics Show.
CD-I is a format being promoted by Philips and Sony, the inventors of the audio compact disc.
The 12 centimetre CD-I discs look exactly like audio CDs, but they can store digital colour graphics, text and computer programs, as well as audio information.
Sony and Philips expect to launch the CD-I worldwide about the middle of next year, and they are betting that once the public gets a taste of what it can do, it will be an international hit.
Others aren't so sure.
The main use for CD-I will be home entertainment, mainly as interactive video games, music and information services.
A CD-I disc can hold more than 100 million words, greater than a 20-volume encyclopaedia.
And thanks to some pretty nifty data compression techniques, it can handle audio soundtracks up to 16 hours long.
You can't do that with normal compact discs because CD players have no way of uncompressing the squeezed-up signal. A CD-I player can do it because it is really a 16-bit computer with a megabyte of memory.
It won't be billed as a computer, of course. That might scare technology-shy consumers away. And with its three simple buttons instead of a keyboard, it won't look much like one either.
"It's as simple to use as a home VCR," stressed a Sony brochure, but perhaps another analogy should be used - quite a few of us find home VCRs anything but simple.
Most CD-I players, as I understand it, will be decks that hook up to your TV. You'll slip in a disc and sit back with a remote control to make choices.
But the prototype Sony was showing at Tokyo earlier this month was a hand-held portable with a built-in 10-centimetre liquid crystal display.
This was very much for personal viewing. The whole thing fitted comfortably into your palm, and it looked like one of Sony's Discman portable audio CD players, only a few centimetres thicker.
The swing-up lid contained the colour screen, which seemed to give a good, clear picture in a wide range of lighting conditions.
At the front of the player were three large buttons, A and B keys for making selections, and a round key marked with arrows to do the job of a joystick.
A body called the CD-I Electronics Show Promotion Council set up an arcade where 30 CD-I discs were being demonstrated.
Most seemed to have either arcade-type games - with surprisingly high-quality graphics - or music discs by Japanese pop stars and Western golden oldies. These contained not only music, but also video clips, lyric sheets, liner notes and a discography of the artist.
The Japanese love the idea of displaying the lyrics while the singer is performing; it fits neatly with the notion of the karioke singalong machines found in thousands of Japanese bars and quite a few homes.
Also included were some children's discs, such as an animated Ugly Duckling and The Child's Paint Box, in which the keys can be used to stop the action and change the colours.
Sony says the most significant CD-I applications haven't been written yet.
There are, for example, immense possibilities for electronic publishing. Multi-volume reference works will fit on one disc, with graphics and sound as well as text.
And CD-I could have a role in education. The Sony prototype would also play ordinary audio CDs and could be hooked up to the living room telly and hi-fi system if you grow tired of the small screen.
No hint was given of a likely cost, either for the player or the discs.
So will CD-I take off? Who knows? A lot will depend on the quality and pricing of the discs, and the economic climate.
Others are trying to persuade us that a new camcorder, digital audio tape recorder, laser disc, digital still camera, personal TV or home computer, will change our lives. But there is a shrinking amount of money to go around.
A reasonable guess might be that CD-I will be an instant hit in gadget-crazy, affluent Japan, but a rather tougher proposition to peddle elsewhere.
On the other hand, if the economic gloom deepens any further, perhaps a little Japanese-style singalong is just the thing to cheer us up.
Anyone care to join in a chorus of Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
A QUICK glance at two other trends evident at the Tokyo show, which attracted a crowd of more than 350,000.
First, video printers have become a major hit with the spread of electronic still cameras.
The cameras store images on a floppy disc and your snaps flash up on the family TV. But everyone still wants a hard copy, so you hit the video-printer button and out rolls a colour picture. Not quite glossy-print quality, but acceptable.
The other is that Digital audio tape (DAT) players, on sale in Japan for some months, are proving a bit of a slow seller. Most companies say that was expected, and they think the concept will take off gradually.
The good news is that they are turning out to be cheaper than expected. Sharp had a very neat palm-top portable model for about $A750. An extra $A150 bought a car accessory kit to mount the player on the dash or central console and hook up to the existing car system via a cassette adaptor.
Sound quality through a good set of headphones was absolutely stunning, certainly as good as a CD.
DAT recorders are expected to reach the Australian market in quantity towards the end of the year.
© 1990 Sydney Morning Herald