DVD - the Megastore

After the Digital Versatile Disk (DVD), a marriage of the Super Density CD from Toshiba/Time Warner and the Multimedia CD from Sony/Philips, had been introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early 1996, there was much wrangling among producers, computer companies and film makers to agree on a single world standard. Once that was agreed, DVD players appeared on the market in early 1998, but, originally, their adoption by consumers was slow. This was mainly because there were not many pre-recorded DVD’s available. However, that situation has changed and over the past two years the sale of DVD players has really taken off.Although the storage capacity of a Compact Disk (CD) at 650 Mbyte appears very large, it is much too small for storing multimedia (combinations of graphics, pictures and sound) data. More especially, it is totally inadequate for storing a complete motion picture with good quality.