Aparently, there is yet another portable music player,
Iomega's ZIP, just in time for the Christmas buying season.
I've seen more TV ads for it in the past few days than I've
seen for minidisc in *years*. The ad points out the high
cost of solid state media, although the ZIP media is still
much more expensive than minidisc! Clearly, the ZIP players
are the *least* technologically sophisticated, however, the
ads protray them as *sexy*.
I was just at Best Buy (Oxford Valley PA near Philadelphia)
this evening. I really had to look hard to find their
minidisc equipment; it was buried under an avalanche of
Philips and RCA audio CD recorders. To their credit, they
did have a couple JE440's in boxes, but none on display.
They had an MZ-R70 and MXD-D5C on display. The MD/CDR audio
equpiment was next to a bunch of bookshelf systems playing
(rather loudly) a commercial radio station with really bad
audio quality. This same store had a whole aisle of MP3
players with an MP3 information kiosk display at the end of
the aisle. I guess marketing's perception is the MP3 is
*sexy* and MD is not.
So far as blank media, they had lots of CDR and CDR audio (a
whole aisle plus some advertised specials in racks sitting
in the middle of the floor), but virtually no MD, blank or
pre-recorded.
This last comment is a little off topic, but while I was in
the store, I noticed that the lone Sony HDTV was almost
buried beneath all the SDTV sets claiming to have "HD
capable" monitors. "HD capable" looks to be a marketing
ploy, because they only support a few of the HD resolutions.
It seems that the Philadelphia area would be one of the
prime locations to sell HDTV, because we've had 4 on-air
HDTV stations for over 2 years!
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