Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!ibmpcug!mantis!mathew
From: mathew@mantis.co.uk (Industrial Poet)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: The Future of DAT?
Message-ID: <L3L043w164w@mantis.co.uk>
Date: 28 Jun 91 18:47:56 GMT
References: <jcb.678069786@lupine>
Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK.
Lines: 19

jcb@NCD.COM (Jim Becker) writes:
> There is also a system that Philips has been working on  that  is  the
> same form factor as audio cassette, but has the underlying workings of
> VCR technology  (tilted  spinning  head..).   It's  all  digital,  and
> includes  the  hardware  for  backwards  compatability to analog audio
> cassettes - a nice design win!

Last I heard, the Philips DCC system used a stationary head, and not a
rotating helical scanning head as used in your VCR.  It gets away with this
by using some advanced data compression.

The stationary head is seen as an advantage; DAT players are expensive to
build because you have to worry about tracking problems, just like you do
with video recorders.


mathew