Sony’s "official" unveiling last week of their new PMW-EX1 solid-state professional HDTV camcorder represents either a sea change in philosophy or an attempt to bet for and against the house simultaneously. Why is that? Because the PMW-EX1 uses flash memory to record and play back HD content. This is a concept that competitors have embraced, but Sony has eschewed, until now, in favor of a Blue-ray record and playback approach.

Panasonic, for example, has been doing flash record/playback for a few years with their P2 solid-state camcorders. But Sony has been extolling the virtues of their XDCAM and XDCAM HD systems for professional video production - formats for acquisition of HD content to record and playback from blue laser optical disc at 30+ Mb/s using MPEG2 codecs.

If XDCAM HD doesn’t ring a bell for you, maybe the consumer version will. We know it as Blu-ray. Sticking with a tried-and-true formula that has worked for the company for several decades, Sony has once again developed a proprietary product for the professional market and derived a consumer format from it along the way. (It’s the economies of scale thing.)

Display Daily readers who haven’t fully comprehended what is at stake in the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD wars should have a much better idea now. It isn’t about Paramount vs. Disney at all. No, it’s a battle between Sony and Toshiba for the hearts and minds of Hollywood. Sony happens to own a motion picture studio that combines the former Columbia/Screen Gems facility with the MGM library, but Toshiba isn’t in the movie business at all.

When XDCAM first appeared a few years ago, there were many questions about the wisdom of using optical discs on shoulder-mounted camera systems. Would they hold up under the rough-and-tumble life of a field cameraman?

To assuage those fears, Sony sent an XDCAM rig down the Colorado River in a whitewater raft, bouncing two and fro and getting spattered with water, just to show that XDCAM could indeed cut the mustard.

All well and good, except that Panasonic stole Sony’s thunder a bit with their P2 system that uses ganged arrays of SD memory cards for recording. As is well known, writing to and reading from solid-state memory is much faster than optical disc. And it’s also easy to preview and delete bad takes.

Sony’s concurrent announcement that there would be 16 GB solid-state ExpressCard storage media for the PMW-EX1 was overshadowed by Panasonic’s same-day announcement of 32 GB cards for their P2 system. (Storage capacities for either system are comparable, depending on the bit rate and quality level selected.)

The fact that the PMW-EX1 even exists is a tacit acknowledgement by Sony that part of their target market just isn’t interested in an optical recording solution. (There are also physical space limitations with newer HDV camcorder designs.) The risk to Sony is that professionals may vote for solid-state recording over their proprietary blue laser system, which would increase pressure to add more flash memory cameras to the line.

At present, other manufacturers of the popular "HDV" small camcorders are either sticking with tape (JVC, Canon) or combining hard and flash drives (Hitachi, Panasonic).

Only Sony stands alone with blue laser recording and playback for the professional market.

A deal earlier this year to equip all CBS owned-and-operated TV stations with XDCAM equipment was a big help. But things would look much better for the overall bottom line if Blu-ray can claim victory over HD DVD.

And as Paul Harvey used to say, that’s the rest of the story.

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