This has signaled the start of a new era for the Chinese consumers, from "reading" discs to recording and erasing discs, the Morning Post reported.

In yesterday's show Philips Electronics talked about market outlook and demonstrated the the functions of its DVD+RW player. The company didn't reveal other details, such as sales projections, price of the player and the discs, and the time of its arrival on local store racks.

Market analysts estimate that the price of the player on the Chinese market is not likely to exceed that of the world market, because the debut of the first DVD+RW in China is four months later than elsewhere in the world.

HP unveiled the world's first DVD+RW drive in the United States last August. The model was the HP DVD-writer dvd100i drive using the DVD+RW format. Current price of the HP DVD-writer dvd100i drive at Best Buy, Circuit City and Comp USA is US$599. The media for the new drive costs US$15.99 per disc.

Philips Electronics and HP are two supporters of the DVD+RW format. The others include MCC/Verbatim, Ricoh Co. Ltd., Sony Corp., Yamaha Corp., Dell Computer and Thompson Multimedia. The eight companies were also developers, promoters and leaders in the CD-R and CD-RW technology.

As the rewritable/recordable CD drives propelled PC sales two years ago, these companies said they also foresee a bright future for the rewritable DVD drives and players.

"These players and drives could do at least the same this year. They can hold 4.7GB of data, seven times as much as recordable CDs," a product manager with HP said in August.

Analysts at Dataquest also conducted a market survey recently on the potential demand for the players.

"Our recent survey indicates that 2.1 million DVD rewritable drives will ship by the end of 2002. By 2005, 14.3 million such players will be shipped," said Mary Craig, a Dataquest analyst.

However, there's still a long way to go before the DVD+RW players can gain market supremacy, the analyst said, because the prices are high and the compatibility issue still remains. Not all consumer-electronics makers and PC makers adopted the same format. Apple computer and Compaq Computer developed their own standard, DVD-RW.

There are altogether three competing standards in the market - DVD+RW, DVD-RW and DVD-RAM.

The first two differ in that DVD+RW processes data storage as well as movies, while DVD-RW is mainly for recording movies. DVD-RAM is reserved for data storage only and the recorded movies on the DVD-RAM discs cannot be played on most consumer DVD players.

(eastday.com December 29, 2001)