James and I took time on Sunday to stroll down to Sony's new flagship show at Pacifico Yokohama, Sony Dream World 2002. While there was little of gaming interest at the show, the rest of Sony Corp. put out some interesting wares which will certainly impact gaming a few years from now.

As a show, Sony Dream World was magnificently done. Whatever you think of Sony products, there couldn't have been many visitors who didn't walk into the hall and get an immediate sense what the marketing gurus call 'Sony style'.

We entered through a gigantic bank of flat screen TVs tinkling out a symphony of Sony brand animations: Vaio, PlayStation, Clie, Walkman, WEGA, CoCoon, and Blu-Ray (is that a cool product name or what?). The show itself was spacious and stylish, with appropriate product R+D heads on the floor demonstrating their products with passion. Video game trade shows, please take note.


BLU-RAY DISC

The technology highlight of the show was certainly the world-wide public debut of the successor to DVD technology: Blu-Ray. Remarkably, Sony already had several entirely working, finished production model Blu-Ray players on display. The design of the unit is stunning. Thick glass windows and smooth sliding panels all over the shop. It sort of looked like a super stylish, glass/silver version of Matsushita's M2 prototype.

First off the bat: storage. The Blu-Ray discs are huge. The disc we had a look at held full DVDs for Panic Room, Fight Club, Spiderman, Stuart Little 2, as well as a few other sundries. Even better, the format is designed to handle true massive resolution video broadcasts: the demo video (nature stuff) outputted from the player was a staggering quality image, quite unlike anything I've seen. Walking around the rest of the show later, I was struck by how entirely inferior the DVD images looked in comparison.

The Blu-Ray discs themselves are rather like small Zip discs, not as clunky as Matsushita's DVD-RAM but still essentially plastic encased CD-size media. The plastic at the bottom retracts while playing, MD style. The discs themselves feel reassuringly solid, yet light and small. You would feel comfortable just chucking Blu-Ray discs in your bag in a way which DVD or CD never could be. We like it.

I had a peek behind the machine, and it had all the usual outputs (component, s-video, but no standard AV -- hah!) as well as a couple of digital outputs, firewire (presumably to let you plug your camcorder into the player and record direct onto Blu-Ray disc) and what looked like some kind of i/o port for software upgrades.

Blu-Ray disc is a recordable format, and we were shown how the technology boils down in real usage terms. You can get 15 hours VHS quality (3.8 Mbs) on one standard disc (24-gigs, but they also come in 36 gig size). You can also store a 3-4 hour movie in super high resolution (15 mbs+). The machine is built ground up for next-generation programming, and can record multiple streams of progressive MPEG2 (via satellite, DVD). It also supports recording of DD 5.1 sound streams, which we haven't seen even in recordable DVD players yet.

Each Blu-Ray disc features a small pre-defined space for chapter selection, menu navigation, picture thumbnails and video previews etc. Everything can be edited, spliced, re-arranged or deleted from the menus via the player itself.

In short, the Blu-Ray disc players were seriously sexy pieces of kit. They looked like the business. The technology is fantastic. The useability and feature set extensive. And it records. Are we going to see this in PS3? The Sony R+D manager at the booth indicated that it was the front runner internally. A creator'a pride, or wishful thinking? After seeing it first hand, we think Sony should give it serious consideration.


-Justin
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