Community Q&A – Time for ASUS!

CDFreaks presents a series of Questions and Answers with people working in the Electronics industry. Questions are gathered by posting a thread in the forums where community members can ask people working in the Electronics industry what they always really wanted to know.

Afterwards the questions are collected, sent to the right person and the answers are posted here, at CDFreaks.com.

This week we posted the answers to your questions asked to Milan Rado, PR Specialist ASUS and Jason Yuan, Product Manager ODD ASUS.

Questions and Answers - ASUS       

1.    Will Asus bring out a DVD writer that can read hard to read DVD/CD disc (scratch/damaged discs)? Currently, a lot of DVD writers on sale suffer in this area.

For minor scratches or damage, the drive can correct the error from the non-damaged area by algorithm. However, if the scratch is too big, it’s impossible to get the correct data. Some DVD Player can read the seriously damaged disc because it chooses to skip the data on damaged areas, the side effect is a little delay or mosaic. However, for IT drive the data integration is extremely important, ASUS makes sure the data can be correctly read and the reading ability achieves the highest industry standard.

2.    What are ASUS’s  plans for further DVD/BD drives development?

For DVD drives, DVDRW is the mainstream and a pretty matured product. Even so, ASUS implemented more features for our 20X DVDRW, like OTS and E-Green Engine. OTS can enhance the write quality; E-Green Engine can save more electricity. In the future, we will study more features for ASUS ODD products and provide more benefits to the user. ASUS will also launch the 22X DVDRW in Q3 this year and 24X DVDRW in 2009. For BD drives, BD is still in the early stage of its lifetime. For BD drives, BD is still in the early stage of its lifetime, ASUS thinks watching BD titles is the main purpose for most of people for two reasons:

• The BD title is easy to access
• The BD-R/RE is still too expensive

For this point, ASUS launched BD COMBO at the end of 2007, and will launch the BD ROM and “External Slim BD COMBO” in Q4 this year. ASUS also plan to launch BD Writer in 2009 when the market becomes more mature.

3.    Could you give us some more info on that Optimal Turning Strategy coz I don’t really understand how it works.

The most important part of OTS is there is a test burning before actually burning the disc. Based on the result of the test burning, the drive will intelligently determine the best burning strategy to burn the disc. Through this test burning, it can cover the difference from operating temperature, media type and drive variations. The result is better burning quality.

4.    I would like to know if you are or will come out with a DVD-Rom with 20x or higher reading speed. I see the 18x and am almost ready to buy a new reader for my duplicator and definitely going with Asus DVD-Rom but am trying to holdout for your new DVD-Rom release.

Thank you for your support for ASUS ODD Products. ASUS launched the first 18X DVDROM and it still the fastest speed in the industry; most competitors even still stay in 16X.

For DVDROM this product segment, we think 18X is enough for most of the user, so we don’t have plans to launch the 20X DVDROM now. However, if the users have strong demand for 20X DVDROM, we will consider doing this project.

5.    What do you think the lifetime will be for Blu-Ray now that HDD storage is getting cheaper and cheaper plus the fact that with Fibre connections to the home it’s also getting easier to get your media online instead of buying discs.

From the current technology trend, we have no doubt that BD will have a long lifetime. ODD, HDD and Internet has different features, we think they won’t replace each other but help each other. Fibre connections are only popular in some developed countries. And even by fibre connection, downloading one DVD title still takes time today, not to mention downloading BD titles. ODD, including BD, is still the most cost-effective media, and has features that HDD and Internet can’t replace. In the future, when you watch BD titles, the “BD live” technology will allow you to download a related game, video or even shopping on the Internet. So ODD/HDD/Internet won’t replace each other, but will work together to provide more benefit to the user.

6.    Will there every be a market for Blu-ray? What is Asus strategy for the future? What kind of products are they going to introduce? Is Blu-ray becoming an important product for Asus? Why isn’t it now already?

BD only takes 2% share of total ODD quantity in 2007. However, we estimate the BD will take 30% of the whole ODD market in 2010 and the sales quantity will exceed DVD product in 2013. BD products are very important for ASUS because of their potential in the future.

Current BD sale quantity is small, but the BD sale quantity will take off from this year when more and more BD titles are available.

7.    The small laptops which you are introducing, are they Blu-ray compatible? Because I saw that Blu-ray drives for laptops are getting cheap, so any plans for that?

There is no doubt that the price will keep decreasing in the future, ASUS will watch this trend carefully and launch the proper BD product.

For EeePC, the CPU is not powerful enough to play BD. In fact, most of the laptops in the market are not powerful enough, however, we think it will change in Q4. ASUS will launch the “External Slim BD COMBO” in Q4 this year. With this product, your can enjoy the BD titles in your laptop, or connect to the TV and the laptop will operate as a BD player immediately. 

8.    What kind of storage devices are important for a laptop anyway?

We think there are three storage devices that are important for laptop: ODD, HDD and Flash.

HDD provides the biggest and fastest local storage solutions in the business today. Both internal and external HDD offer the consumer good answers for the need for large back-ups and media storage. Whether USB, eSata or Ethernet, these devices are fast and provide the largest capacity at affordable prices. The drawback is the lesser mobility and exchange of data between users.

Flash is very small and can be carried away easily, but the price is high and you won’t give it permanently to your friends if you want to share files with them.

ODD is still the most important medium for music playback. When you want to share photos with your friends, burning a DVD is the easiest and most cost effective way. For BD, one BD disc can contain 50GB data. 250GB HDD can only contain 5 BD titles. Transferring 50GB’s data via the Internet is still too slow. So BD drive will certainly be the important role for laptop or PC.

All these storage devices have their advantages to satisfy user’s different demand.

We would like to thank Milan Rado and Jason Yuan for cooperating with us and answering the questions.