 One of the smallest camcorders around: Sony's digital MicroMV ($1,300) |
Sony: Mini Cams, MiniDiscs, and Maxi Car Stereo
Sony always likes to go last on press day to trump its rivals. President Nashida described the company's mission statement as "Ubiquitous Value Network" (as opposed to the Home Shopping Network?). Competing with Panasonic for the smallest camcorder, Sony showed its digital MicroMV camcorder, which uses a tape cassette not much larger than a thumbnail and will sell for $1,300.
 Fujio Nishida, president of Sony Electronics, loves MiniDisc now more than ever and said 2002 would be the year the format finally takes off. Really. |
Sony continues promoting its MiniDisc (MD) format, always looking for a new use. This time it showed the NetMD players, which store 5 hours of compressed audio on a $2 disc and boast 50 hours of battery life. You can download tunes from your PC at 32x without opening any special programs on the PC. While RCA installed a hard drive in a handheld portable, Sony installed one in its Xplod MEX-HD1 for car stereo use. The unit can store 165 hours of tunes, rip tracks from CDs to the hard drive at 8x speed, and copy songs to Memory Sticks for use in Sony portables. All that technology will set you back $1,500. If you prefer a 32,000-color LCD screen in your head unit, the Explod MEX-5DI offers the highest-resolution faceplate on earth for $1,000. You can load images from Memory Sticks.
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