Sony Says UMD Is Here To Stay

PlayStation Portable senior marketing manager John Koller spoke with the Pocket Gamer site about the much-maligned UMD format. The disc used in the PSP for both games and movies, few stores carry UMD movies any more. Just the same, says Koller, Sony supports it 100%. From the interview: "'UMD possesses many strengths, from size to form factor to portability,' he says. The same can easily be said of the UMD's cartridge counterpart on Nintendo DS. However, ease of UMD manufacturing is seen as a winning benefit. 'Duplication of UMDs is much easier, cheaper than cartridges,' Koller adds. 'We've really optimized time and cost by going with a disc-based format.' On the topic of UMD weaknesses, Koller is candid: 'There's no question the biggest weakness is related to porting games from other platforms. Publishers are concerned about the size of UMD because they can't cram a DVD game on to it.'"

cartridge vs cd/dvd?

[poisonfruitloops]

comparing it to DS cartridges is a bit odd for gaming too... you can't write to a UMD can you? (i don't own a psp so i don't know, i just thought it was the case)

From

[MemoryDragon]

a price standpoint umd is outright weird, movies three times the price of a normal dvd which are not copyable (face it even illegal dvd backups are the norm not the exception) from a technical standpoint a mixed bag, they finally added caddies to improve the lifespan, but they left out a hole the size of a finger, so the caddies are outright pointless. The medium itself is a nice extension to dvds, but since they are not writable they serve only one purpose, customer lock in! Besides that 2 gig sd cards are now somewhat 10 dollars or so, so even if sony would bring out writable umd drives, they would be bound to fail, the next medium which will go the way of the dodo will be dvds (and their rw incarnations), 4 gig memory cards soon will be in the pricerange of a no brainer!

UMDs biggest weakness?

[Aphrika]

'There's no question the biggest weakness is related to porting games from other platforms

Um... no. The UMDs biggest weakness is that honking great window that lets sand/dust/jam/toast/your gran in to destroy the game you bought with your hard-earned cash.

That said, a UMD disc is just a minidisc (sans cover) using DVD technology rather than CD technology. It won't be long until BluMD is here folks!

it's not small, it's far from it

[Fross]

Why do people keep saying the UMD is small? It's not, its physical size is way bigger than it should be, for its storage capacity. You can get 2 gig SD cards [amazon.com] dirt cheap already, which are smaller, technically hold more, more energy-efficient, and probably load faster, too.

It's a proprietary, unwieldy format (can't display UMD movies on a tv, can't get writers or blank ones), but it's also bulky compared to alternatives (hell, i'd rather carry USB sticks), and small storage compared to alternatives.

Cache to Memory Stick

[blackwing0013]

Well, since there is news that the latest PSP firmware already has a built-in ISO loader, I hope Sony would make the PSP to cache the UMD on the Memory Stick. And by cache, I mean rip/copy the whole UMD to the Memory Stick. I don't care if that copy will be locked on a parituclar PSP (you still have the original UMD anyway) as long as I can rung the game that I bought from the Memory Stick so that games would load faster and that my PSP would have longer battery life.