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By Yoshiko Hara
TOKYO - Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. said it will market a DVD-RAM drive and disks at strategic prices in the United States beginning in January. Word of the company's product plans came as Pioneer Electric Corp. and Ricoh Co. Ltd. disclosed plans for two derivative systems.
At a recent conference, Pioneer detailed a 1,000-time rewritable system it intends to promote as a standard, and Ricoh described a 4.7-Gbyte phase-change rewritable offering.
An internal version of the Matsushita DVD-RAM drive will retail for $799 with a SCSI interface. Disks with 2.6-Gbyte capacity will sell for $24.95; double-sided, 5.2Gbyte disks will go for $39.95. Matsushita set the price to realize less than 1 cent/Mbyte, Matsushita spokesman said.
An AT Attachment Packet Interface (Atapi) version of the drive, for the OEM market, will follow the rollout of the SCSI offering. For the Japanese consumer market, an external drive with a SCSI interface will be offered at about a 10 percent price premium over the internal drive.
The RAM drive features a two-lens head, which allows writing to DVD-RAM and phase-change disks, reading of DVDROMs at 2x...