Sony makes an interesting attempt at pushing their new Hi-MD format (for “High Capacity MiniDisc”), which for those of you that don’t know, has a 1 gigabyte capacity. It’s called the “MCMD-R1,” and for good reason. What reason that is, I do not know. The aptly named device, or whatever, attaches to a Hi-MD recorder via a USB cable. Pushing the “copy” button, images will be copied from a memory card to the Hi-MD disc. An interesting idea, but I personally find the numerous drawbacks to be…drawbacky. First of all, it apparently only does images. You can’t connect even it to a PC’s USB port – this makes the sub $80 device quite expensive. Also, the reader does support nearly every media under the sun, but it can only read from one card at a time.
If I were Sony, I’d instead make this into a CD drive. You could press the button, and it would copy the disc’s contents onto a Hi-MD. But this is on the very fringes of legality as we know it. Oh well.
Read – Product Information [SonyJP]
