Rich D’Ambrise, director of technology at Maxell, was super excited about this year’s show because Maxell was releasing a product that’s been two years in the making, the iVDR-Xtreme.
The iVDR-Xtreme is easily portable at only 6.1oz and fits in a shirt pocket (they did that on purpose, he told me). It’s also been tested to meet military specs for temperature resistance and can resist shock from a drop of 4.6ft (1.4) onto tile or concrete. During the testing process, D’Ambrise said, they dropped the cartridge repeatedly to see which end it most often landed on, then they added additional protection to that side.
It features a 250GB storage capacity and transfer rates of up to 3Gb/s (when connected to an iVDR device — USB and FireWire, both of which it supports, yield 480Mb/s and 830Mb/s, respectively). It’s capable of storing up to 20 hours of HD video, 19 hours of digital video and 110 hours of DVD-quality video. Why only 250GB? According to D’Ambrise, that’s what users wanted. Maxell could’ve designed it for 500GB, but users don’t want all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. It’s also based on an SATA model with a 26-pin interface.
Another unique feature is the iVDR’s “electronic paper display.” On the front of the cartridge, there’s a small screen into which you can drag and drop a preview image from your content, and it stays there for easy identification. So not only can you keep it on a shelf and label the case, you can also store it front-facing for at-a-glance identification.
