5 ms·

Sony DD-1EX Electronic Book Player

39 points by mattowen_uk 6y ago

HardwareLust 6y ago
Techmoan did a video on these, pretty interesting: https://youtu.be/MXXiRJAKC4w https://youtu.be/MXXiRJAKC4w I wanted one of these so bad back in the day. Never had the cash though unfortunately.
- mechagodzilla 6y ago
  It's an interesting observation that there wasn't really a viable market for an ebook device with large-capacity, expensive write-only media - it's not that publishers didn't want to sell e-books, or that readers didn't want a library-on-a-CD, but that there was no good way to sell individual books since customers couldn't burn their own CDs, and didn't want to carry 50 CDs with them.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > It's an interesting observation that there wasn't really a viable market for an ebook device with large-capacity, expensive write-only media Or even, perhaps more relevantly, with read-only media.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    Encarta could have been the killer app.
- smcleod 6y ago
  Ah, my favourite Youtube channel - highly recommend TechMoan!
  - petepete 6y ago
    I thought I had a decent knowledge of obsolete audio and video formats until I started watching his channel. It's fantastic. Also nice to see someone doing that kind of thing on YouTube with a local (well, to me) accent.
baybal2 6y ago
Sony invented a gazillion of all kinds of disk, tape, and cartridge formats, all to make people buy new hardware by forcing obsolescence. And then... came the Internet. Parents once brought me an MD player from Japan back in nineties. We bought dozens of MD cartridges, but only 3 ever worked. Orienting in between at least 3 visually undistinguishable MD cartridge types was very frustrating, and near impossible for non-Japanese.
- kamarg 6y ago
  I loved my mini-disc player. They somehow felt more futuristic than than the better alternatives. It's too bad there was virtually no support for them in the US.
- Jermaine_Jabi 6y ago
  Thats funny to hear, I had a minidisc player as a young tech neophyte in North America and never had compatibility issues, or even until now knew there were variants of md.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    The variants came along a good few years after MD hardware went on sale in the US - the first MiniDisc player went on sale in the US in September 1992, while NetMD wasn't introduced until 2001 and Hi-MD in 2004. With the original iPod also introduced in 2001, and MD's high media cost and lack of pre-recorded releases having kept it firmly in its original niche, I think probably most MD adopters in the US didn't have compatibility problems for the simple reason that, by the time those problems became possible, we weren't really bothering with MiniDisc any more anyway. That said, NetMD was just a different format on the same media, and a line of players capable of transferring audio from a computer digitally via USB. You can't use a NetMD-formatted disc in a non-NetMD player, but you can still reformat and use the disc in an older player, and a NetMD player will play back discs using the older format. The real compatibility barrier is Hi-MD, which uses a totally different media formulation in order to reach its ~1GB capacity; as far as I know, Hi-MD media, however formatted, can't be used in any non Hi-MD player. (Even for latter-day MiniDisc aficionados such as myself, that's still not a huge barrier, because not much Hi-MD media was ever made, and you can expect to pay $60 or more for a single disc today. Hi-MD players are likewise rare and pricey, so I suspect most folks who get into the medium for hobby reasons end up sticking with NetMD.)
giantrobot 6y ago
I've got a couple of these bad boys in my retro tech collection. I've only got a couple "books" and fewer in English. The books are much harder to find than working players, at least in the US. If you're thinking of getting one I don't recommend it. Finding a properly working model is non-trivial and once you do finding content is harder. At the end of the day you've got a hard to use dictionary. I didn't find out these details until I owned them. However I have a soft spot for Sony's industrial design from the 90s. I've got a couple of these, Pyxis GPS receivers, and some Hi-8/Digital-8 pieces. I think they just look cool and some I lusted after when I was younger. It's way more techno looking than their 70s and 80s ID and way cooler than their post-2000 retro-esque ID.
- fumar 6y ago
  Same, I love 90s peak Sony. It is amazing the amount of products they released. They had an offering for every niche.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    And that was their downfall. Nobody cared for a gazillion cartridges, sticks, disks, drives etc if it all sounded exactly the same in the end.
- awhitby 6y ago
  This made me nostalgic for a 1990s Sony shortwave radio that I had as a kid. It replaced a much larger probably 1980s era radio that my grandfather passed on to me. By comparison this 1990s one was magically miniature - and very similar design to book reader: https://swling.com/blog/2016/09/the-sony-icf-sw100-a-miniture-dx-marvel-never-likely-to-be-repeated/ https://swling.com/blog/2016/09/the-sony-icf-sw100-a-minitur...
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    Oh man that's a looker. *Sony desire rising*
  - reaperducer 6y ago
PostOnce 6y ago
more pics and info https://retrostuff.org/2019/05/22/sony-dd-1ex-data-discman-repair/ https://retrostuff.org/2019/05/22/sony-dd-1ex-data-discman-r...

39 points by mattowen_uk 6y ago

Techmoan did a video on these, pretty interesting: https://youtu.be/MXXiRJAKC4w https://youtu.be/MXXiRJAKC4w I wanted one of these so bad back in the day. Never had the cash though unfortunately.

mechagodzilla 6y ago
It's an interesting observation that there wasn't really a viable market for an ebook device with large-capacity, expensive write-only media - it's not that publishers didn't want to sell e-books, or that readers didn't want a library-on-a-CD, but that there was no good way to sell individual books since customers couldn't burn their own CDs, and didn't want to carry 50 CDs with them.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > It's an interesting observation that there wasn't really a viable market for an ebook device with large-capacity, expensive write-only media Or even, perhaps more relevantly, with read-only media.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Encarta could have been the killer app.
smcleod 6y ago
Ah, my favourite Youtube channel - highly recommend TechMoan!
- petepete 6y ago
  I thought I had a decent knowledge of obsolete audio and video formats until I started watching his channel. It's fantastic. Also nice to see someone doing that kind of thing on YouTube with a local (well, to me) accent.

baybal2 6y ago

Sony invented a gazillion of all kinds of disk, tape, and cartridge formats, all to make people buy new hardware by forcing obsolescence. And then... came the Internet. Parents once brought me an MD player from Japan back in nineties. We bought dozens of MD cartridges, but only 3 ever worked. Orienting in between at least 3 visually undistinguishable MD cartridge types was very frustrating, and near impossible for non-Japanese.

kamarg 6y ago
I loved my mini-disc player. They somehow felt more futuristic than than the better alternatives. It's too bad there was virtually no support for them in the US.
Jermaine_Jabi 6y ago
Thats funny to hear, I had a minidisc player as a young tech neophyte in North America and never had compatibility issues, or even until now knew there were variants of md.
- throwanem 6y ago
  The variants came along a good few years after MD hardware went on sale in the US - the first MiniDisc player went on sale in the US in September 1992, while NetMD wasn't introduced until 2001 and Hi-MD in 2004. With the original iPod also introduced in 2001, and MD's high media cost and lack of pre-recorded releases having kept it firmly in its original niche, I think probably most MD adopters in the US didn't have compatibility problems for the simple reason that, by the time those problems became possible, we weren't really bothering with MiniDisc any more anyway. That said, NetMD was just a different format on the same media, and a line of players capable of transferring audio from a computer digitally via USB. You can't use a NetMD-formatted disc in a non-NetMD player, but you can still reformat and use the disc in an older player, and a NetMD player will play back discs using the older format. The real compatibility barrier is Hi-MD, which uses a totally different media formulation in order to reach its ~1GB capacity; as far as I know, Hi-MD media, however formatted, can't be used in any non Hi-MD player. (Even for latter-day MiniDisc aficionados such as myself, that's still not a huge barrier, because not much Hi-MD media was ever made, and you can expect to pay $60 or more for a single disc today. Hi-MD players are likewise rare and pricey, so I suspect most folks who get into the medium for hobby reasons end up sticking with NetMD.)

giantrobot 6y ago

I've got a couple of these bad boys in my retro tech collection. I've only got a couple "books" and fewer in English. The books are much harder to find than working players, at least in the US. If you're thinking of getting one I don't recommend it. Finding a properly working model is non-trivial and once you do finding content is harder. At the end of the day you've got a hard to use dictionary. I didn't find out these details until I owned them. However I have a soft spot for Sony's industrial design from the 90s. I've got a couple of these, Pyxis GPS receivers, and some Hi-8/Digital-8 pieces. I think they just look cool and some I lusted after when I was younger. It's way more techno looking than their 70s and 80s ID and way cooler than their post-2000 retro-esque ID.

fumar 6y ago
Same, I love 90s peak Sony. It is amazing the amount of products they released. They had an offering for every niche.
- baybal2 6y ago
  And that was their downfall. Nobody cared for a gazillion cartridges, sticks, disks, drives etc if it all sounded exactly the same in the end.
awhitby 6y ago
This made me nostalgic for a 1990s Sony shortwave radio that I had as a kid. It replaced a much larger probably 1980s era radio that my grandfather passed on to me. By comparison this 1990s one was magically miniature - and very similar design to book reader: https://swling.com/blog/2016/09/the-sony-icf-sw100-a-miniture-dx-marvel-never-likely-to-be-repeated/ https://swling.com/blog/2016/09/the-sony-icf-sw100-a-minitur...
- giantrobot 6y ago
  Oh man that's a looker. *Sony desire rising*
- reaperducer 6y ago

PostOnce 6y ago

more pics and info https://retrostuff.org/2019/05/22/sony-dd-1ex-data-discman-repair/ https://retrostuff.org/2019/05/22/sony-dd-1ex-data-discman-r...