CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Sony Hawaii chief Ryozo Sakai holds up a 20-year-old Sony Betacam and a new DCR TRV80 video camera.
Shrinking Sony
The electronics maker is putting
scads of tech gear in small spaces
These days a printed instruction book -- if there is one -- is liable to be four or five times bigger, fatter and heavier than the device it describes.
That was clear from demonstrations yesterday of some of the new devices made by Sony Corp., one of the pioneers in making things small.
Holding in one hand the original Sony video camera, introduced in 1980, a device that today looks close in size to the commercial cameras TV crews use, Ryozo Sakai, president of Sony Hawaii Co., almost palmed Sony's latest digital video camera in his other hand. The message was obvious: Today everything is smaller, but still more powerful.
Going smaller "makes things more personal," Sakai told a news conference at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. "What used to be one per household is now one per person," he said.
Take Sony's famous Walkman, for instance, introduced in Japan in 1979 and since copied by manufacturers all over the world. The size of a small paperback novel, the original looks gigantic alongside the new NW-MS70D (yes, all the new stuff has numbers like that), better known as the Network Walkman digital music player. Less than two inches on its longest side, it can store up to 11 hours of high-fidelity music.
CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Sony's Jim Calverley shows a Network Walkman player that can hold 11 hours of music.
It can even hold a small version of Sony's storage device, the Memory Stick, to add more hours.
It can load from any MP3 device, from a Windows media player and from other digital sound devices and it contains a rechargeable battery that can run the device for up to 33 hours. It sells for about $300.
In a room walled by large-screen TVs showing flawless video, with no dots or lines and crystal-sharp edges to every object shown, Sakai and Sony's demonstrators showed off the newest video development -- the Blu-ray Disc recorder. The creation of 10 international companies, including Sony, it uses new blue-violet laser technology for a finer, deeper and clearer recording. The result is the ability to put two-plus hours of high-definition video and sound on one 23-gigabyte disk. The same disk will hold 12 hours of regular TV.
Launched only in Japan so far, with Sony as the first company to get on the market with a commercial version, the BDZ-S77 retails for about $3,800.
Sony's approach isn't all about small and high-capacity devices, however. It has gone into thin, wide, digital video screens, run by a relatively tiny TV box.
Reminiscing about the 35 years of Sony Hawaii, Sakai said nobody would have thought then that there would be TV screens thin enough to hang on a wall.
The 35 years in the islands has been good for Sony. Sakai said that in the fiscal year through March 31, Sony Hawaii had sales of $187 million and a profit of $5 million. Some of that growth was because of Sony Corp.'s move seven years ago to make Sony Hawaii the base for its sales to U.S. military base exchanges around the world.
Sony executives and technical experts are in Hawaii this week to conduct training and demonstration sessions for retailers.
