Posted 11/04/08 at 10:39:32 AM by Paul Lilly

Pioneer has to be feeling giddy following its most recent court victory. Pioneer had accused Samsung of willfully infringing on two of its patents -- U.S. Patent Numbers 5,182,489 and 5,640,068 -- covering plasma display technology. It took an eight-day trial to convince Hon. David J. Folsom in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Marshall, who awarded Pioneer with a $59 million verdict, part of which covers lost profits and royalties.

"We are very pleased with the jury's finding," says Mr. Baxter of McKool Smith, the firm who represented Pioneer. "This was a complicated case and we were fortunate to have jurors that closely examined the facts before reaching their verdict."

And fortunate Pioneer was. The jury ruled in favor of the company on every count brought against Samsung. Not surprisingly, Samsung has yet to comment on the ruling.

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samsung, lawsuit, verdict, legal, consumer electronics, pioneer

Posted 07/08/08 at 07:52:51 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Pioneer has to its credit a $145 Blu-ray player - on sale only in China, perhaps the cheapest BRD player in the world. However, it was a tad watchful during the course of the format war. Now with Blu-ray having emerged victorious, Pioneer is making a deeper commitment to it. It has announced plans to launch Blu-ray recorders by the end of the year in Japan. The recorders will be developed with some help from its minority owner Sharp (14% stake), which is amongst the six Japanese majors currently offering Blu-ray recorders.

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Posted 07/07/08 at 03:15:18 PM by Paul Lilly

Following Hitachi's annoucement of plans to hit 5TB in a single hard drive by 2010, Pioneer follows suit by proclaiming a major advancement in the optical storage arena with an unprecedented 16-layer optical disc capable of storing 400GB. Presumably intended for distribution as Blu-ray media, Pioneer points out the new disc's 25GB  per-layer capacity is the same as that of a Blu-ray disc (BD).

Cross-talk among multiple layers has been a stickling point in the optical industry, but Pioneer claims to have tackled the problem with a specialized disc structure designed to reduce interference from adjacent layers. And what about compatibility with existing Blu-ray players? Pioneer says that because the optical specifications of the lens are the same as those for existing BD discs, there shouldn't be any compatibility concerns between the new 16-layer discs and existing BD media.

Dampening the announcement, the 16-layer discs are read-only. That may change in time, but for the here and now, you'll still need to resort to standard discs or HDDs to store your epic  music collection, downloaded videos, and other legally acquired data. Of course, finding someone who owns a Blu-ray drive capable of burning BD discs is more rare than spoting a MacBook victory at Maximum PC. 

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Posted 06/20/08 at 09:20:37 PM by Pulkit Chandna

A few months back when Toshiba accepted defeat in the optical media wars and withdrew its HD DVD format, many trenchant analysts didn’t hurriedly crown Blu-ray the winner, instead they cast serious doubts on its success – and rightly so. But with Panasonic unveiling the world’s first 6x Blu-ray write-once disc and Pioneer selling probably the cheapest Blu-ray player in the world, Blu-ray is making sturdy progress. Read further to know more about Pioneer’s cheap Blu-ray player and the 6x Blu-ray media.

Image Credit: Cnet

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Blu-ray, china, panasonic, pioneer, $145 player, 6x write-once media, japan, cheap