What's new for PCs in 2004What to look for in peripherals for 2004
In the storage market, we see SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) interface emerging as the de facto standard for desktop hard drives. We can expect drive capacities and speeds to increase continually with larger platter sizes as well as faster rotational speeds. For the DVD market, our crystal ball says the format wars will continue and multiformat DVD drives will remain the order of the day. Still, there will be coexistence among the pluses and minuses, judging from the market shares of both formats. Other things to anticipate are dual-layered DVD discs from both the plus and minus camps. The dual-layered recording involves writing data on two separate surfaces, layered like coats of paint, on a DVD. You should also be able to see 16x write drives reaching the market this year, at least for the +R side of the fence. Coming to a screen near you this year may be more affordable and faster 17-inch LCD monitors. Already we've seen Korean manufacturer Samsung go to market with a 12ms response time LCD. Although the faster response times will result in the sacrifice of color depth, these products will still appeal to gamers who need fast responses to prevent ghosting.
In the Wi-Fi world, you'll be seeing tweaked 802.11g devices promising twice the performance in the early part of the year. This year, we might also be able to catch a glimpse of the eagerly awaited 802.11e standard. The new standard promises to bring QoS (Quality of Service) and multimedia support to the wireless world, while maintaining full backward compatibility with the 802.11a and 802.11b standards. This can just be what the home needs to get wireless streaming of videos started. For printers, HP has said it also follows Moore's Law in that it expects performance to double every 18 months. It has also shown us some prototypes of its new printhead (pen) which is slated to have 4,000 nozzles. In some of the graphs we've seen, it appears the printer leader is expecting to have a system capable of firing a billion drops per second sometime in 2007. Until then, we'll just have to "bear" with the next-generation 4,000-nozzle pens due to arrive this year. Likewise, you can expect similar performances from Epson and Canon. The latter is already at 3,072 nozzles. Apart from print performance, you'll continue to come across other value-added features such as PictBridge and Wi-Fi connectivity.
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