Sony

Sony Corporation (Japanese katakana: ソニー) {{Tyo|6758}}, {{nyse|SNE}} is a global consumer electronics corporation based in Tokyo, Japan. It is currently one of the world's largest producers of consumer electronics and is one of the biggest corporations in Japan.

Proprietary formats

Sony has historically been notable for creating its own in-house standards for new recording and storage technologies instead of adopting those of other manufacturers and standards bodies. The most infamous of these was the videotape format war of the early 1980s, when Sony marketed its Betamax system for video cassette recorders against the VHS format developed by JVC. In the end, VHS gained critical mass in the marketplace and became the worldwide standard for consumer VCRs and Sony had no choice but to capitulate.

Related Topics:
Videotape format war - 1980s - Betamax - Video cassette recorder - VHS - JVC

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Since then, Sony has continued to introduce its own versions of storage technologies, with varying success. Examples include:

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• MiniDisc was created by Sony for use in portable music players. They were designed to share the market of Walkman products. Low consumer adoption has seen the product fail.
• Sony also makes heavy use of its Memory Stick flash memory cards for digital cameras and other portable devices, however, other manufacturers are also making use of this technology.
• It also attempted to compete with the Iomega Zip drive and Imation SuperDisk with their HiFD, but this proved a severe failure.
• In 1993 Sony challenged the industry standard Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound format with its newer and more advanced proprietary motion picture digital audio format called SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound) This format employed eight channels (7.1) of audio opposed to just six used in Dolby Digital 5.1 at the time. Unlike Dolby Digital, SDDS utilized a method of backup by having mirrored arrays of bits on both sides of the film which acted as a measure of reliability in case the film was partially damaged. Ultimately SDDS has been vastly overshadowed by the preferred DTS (Digital Theatre System) and Dolby Digital standards in both the motion picture industry and home audio formats.
• Since the introduction of the MiniDisc format, Sony has attempted to promote its own audio compression technologies under the ATRAC brand, against more widely-used formats like MP3 and Windows Media Audio. Until late 2004, Sony's Network Walkman line of digital portable music players did not support the MP3 de facto standard natively, although the software provided with them would convert MP3 files into the ATRAC or ATRAC3 formats.
• Sony has is currently pushing its Blu-Ray optical digital versatile disk format, which is likely to compete with Toshiba's HD-DVD. However, both formats have significant industry backing and it is unclear whether this will prove to be a mistake for Sony, or whether their format will win out.
• The PSP (PlayStation Portable) handheld gaming system uses the proprietary Universal Media Disc (UMD) format on which games are distributed.
• Sony and Philips introduced the high-fidelity audio system SACD in 1999, but it has since been entrenched in a format war with DVD-Audio. At present, neither has gained a major foothold on the general public, CDs being preferred by consumers with its large penetration in consumer devices.