PS: PS: In the plot at the end of the previous chapter, two digital cameras were made to make Jurassic Park give up the film, and the author was a little whimsical and has already made modifications!

Relying on their strong strength in optical and electronic technology, Japanese companies have almost dominated the field of imaging equipment, whether it is the camera, video recorder, or video camera market!

If American and European companies are in the high-end field, they can still have some strength to resist. However, in the low-end civilian field, Japanese companies have defeated their European and American competitors by relying on continuous technological innovation and a strong level of cost control!

The world's first home video camera was launched by Japan's JVC in 1976. The VHS camera is also compatible with VHS recorders. Not to be outdone, another Japanese company, Sony, was determined to compete again in the home video camera market, although it lost to JVC in the previous video recorder format battle!

Sony, in conjunction with Sharp and Canon, soon also launched an 8mm camera, the V8. The full weight of this home video camera is less than 1KG, which is a great breakthrough in portability. Home cameras are more high-end than cameras, and only in developed areas with high per capita incomes such as the United States, Japan, and Europe are relatively popular!

In fact, in a year or two, ABC will broadcast a show called "American Family Funny Video". The general public can use their own cameras to send those funny and hilarious images that they have inadvertently captured to the television station. And the family that won the title of the funniest video in each issue. You can get a $10,000 bonus.

In another time and space, this show is still prosperous after more than 20 years, and it is still playing until Li Xuan crosses! The number of video cameras in American households is high. If a domestic TV station also engages in such a program, it is estimated that the director will still need to worry about whether he can collect enough screening materials!

In fact, RCA also has a good foundation in the field of cameras, especially in the field of broadcast cameras. Because RCA established the nation's first television network, it began developing the camera equipment needed to record television programs decades ago.

Japanese companies have already entered the civilian camera market ahead of schedule, and it will be difficult for RCA to share much of the broth if they follow suit. So it has to look for a breakthrough! The opportunity to upgrade photographic equipment from the analog era to the digital age is the perfect time for RCA to break the existing pattern!

Whether it is a digital camera or a digital video recorder, the conversion from analog to digital is inseparable from a core component - CCD. The scientific name for CCD is called charge-coupled device. It is an image sensor that converts optical images directly into digital signals. In another time and space, two inventors of CCD were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009 for this invention.

The first CCD chip came after the advent of Bell Labs in 1969. RCA was one of the first U.S. companies to follow up on CCD technology. It's just that RCA has not continued to invest on a large scale in this field, so that it was quickly overtaken by Japan's Sony!

In 1981, Sony Corporation introduced the world's first commercial camera without photographic film, the Mavica, by applying CCD image sensors to cameras, thus beginning the history of digital cameras.

The image sensor is actually a kind of integrated circuit, which has a wide range of applications in the fields of digital cameras, mobile phone cameras, computer cameras, surveillance cameras, etc., with a total global market size of more than 10 billion US dollars.

Among them, Sony is the biggest winner in the sensor market. Exclusive 40% share. So don't look at Sony's mobile phone and other businesses, which have long since faded under the price war strangulation of Chinese manufacturers. But it's still making a lot of money on meta parts!

In the field of CCD sensors, RCA has been thrown away by Sony, but it has accumulated a good foundation for its research in the past few years. After RCA was acquired by the Eastern Group, its semiconductor business was merged into Fairchild Semiconductor.

In the past two years, Fairchild Semiconductor has acquired the CCD R&D department of Deyi Company and Express Semiconductor Co., Ltd., which are also the first companies to enter the CCD field of R&D. And Fairchild is also working closely with Kodak, which actually launched the world's first CCD sensor with a resolution of 1 million pixels as early as last year.

Kodak's level of technology in the field of image sensors is now in no way inferior to Sony. Many people say that Kodak's management made a mistake in judging the digital camera, which led to the company's future decline, but this is actually a misunderstanding to some extent.

Kodak has actually been an important driver of camera digitization, and with the introduction of the DCS100 camera in 1990, it first established the general model of digital cameras in the world, and soon developed into a universal standard in the industry.

It's just that Kodak's core business has always been film rather than cameras. However, in terms of digital camera technology, the speed of updating of Japanese companies can be described as a rapid progress. Kodak was so engrossed in the film business that it was unable to keep up with the pace of Japanese companies!

Kodak was not so much a mistake in strategic choice as it was a defeat in the hard-fought market competition. In fact, this situation began to emerge as early as the 80s, because even Kodak's film business, which Kodak was most proud of, quickly lost a large number of markets under the impact of Japan's Fuji company.

Kodak, which is on the decline, does not refuse to cooperate with the Eastern Bloc. Although it has some competition with RCA in the field of cameras, everyone's main enemy at present is Japanese companies. What's more, Kodak is not a professional semiconductor company, and Fairchild Semiconductor's strong experience in integrated circuits is actually what it lacks!

Of course, the Eastern Bloc in addition to the layout of CCD image sensor technology. What's more, it is the first to develop image compression formats. For the Eastern Bloc, this is a bit better.

In later generations, there was a very popular audio player called MP3, and the origin of this name is because of the compression format of MP3 music players. All follow the third level of the MPEG-1 standard.

MPEG is an organization established by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Committee on Electrical Engineering (IEE) to develop international standards for moving images and speech compression. In another time and space, MPEG was only established in 1988, and it has successively formulated standards such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. MP3 and VCD compression formats follow the MPEG-1 standard, while DV and DVD follow the MPEG-2 standard.

With the intervention of the Eastern Bloc, the MPEG organization of this time and space was established ahead of schedule as early as 1985. The first generation of the MPEG-1 standard, which is being developed, incorporates many of the results of the Eastern Bloc's research in the field of digital compression!

As far as Li Xuan knew. The development of the MPEG-1 standard is almost complete, and it is ready to be officially released to the world early next year. The fact that the Eastern Bloc is actively promoting the creation of the MPEG group means that it will give up the exclusive rights to many patents.

Because any technology wants to be accepted by the International Organization for Standardization. The premise of becoming an international standard is that the technology must be unconditionally available to all enterprises around the world, and the technology holder can only charge a low patent license fee!

However, international giants such as the Eastern Group and IBM are still very willing to make their technology an international standard. Because they are giving up a part of their interests at the same time. But you can get more generous rewards elsewhere!

For example, the Eastern Group is deeply involved in the development of the MPEG-1 standard. Let this future be accepted by most manufacturers around the world, video and audio lossy compression standards, according to their own will. Eastern Group's experience in video and audio compression algorithms is far ahead of other companies.

In fact, the Oriental Research Institute is developing a video decoder that meets the MPEG-1 technical specifications, and the VCD player of this time and space will also come out several years earlier than the other time and space. In another time and space, VCD only had a huge impact on video recorders in emerging markets, but it did not make much waves in major video recorder markets such as North America, Europe, and Japan.

The main reason for this is that compared with the existing tape recorders, VCD does not have much breakthrough in technical indicators such as image clarity. Therefore, it will not have the effect of upgrading. All the patents of the VCR are controlled by Japanese companies such as JVC, Panasonic, and Sony, and they have established strong distribution channels in the European and American markets.

But the new VCD player. It was first invented by China's Wanyan Company. Jiang Wanmeng, who developed VCD, did not apply for any patents. This led to the rapid spread of VCD manufacturing technology, and its core component, the chip decoder, was in the hands of a small American company called C-Cube.

Therefore, for Japanese electronics companies, they can monopolize all the interests of selling video recorders, but they need to share a lot of profits in the sale of VCDs. Therefore, these companies are naturally reluctant to allow VCDs to flood into the VCR market, causing damage to their existing interests.

In emerging markets, due to the relatively expensive price of video recorders, the popularity is low, but it is just with the help of cheaper VCDs to conquer this part of the market! Therefore, VCDs in another time and space are only popular in China, and Southeast Asia and other markets.

But now the situation facing the Eastern Bloc is exactly the opposite, although RCA has a large market share in the US video recorder market. However, the core patent of the video recorder is in the hands of Japanese companies, and each RCA video recorder needs to pay a large number of patent fees, which puts RCA's products at a natural disadvantage in the competition.

In recent years, RCA has gradually shifted all of its production links to the mainland, Taiwan and other regions. In the past, all of RCA's video recorder production operations were manufactured by Japan's JVC and Panasonic. But now the domestic Guangming OCT Electronics Company has also begun to undertake RCA's video recorder production orders.

The OEM cost of domestic enterprises is naturally much lower than that of Japanese enterprises. RCA's process transfer plan can effectively reduce the production cost of products. But this also makes it gradually distance from traditional cooperative companies such as Panasonic and JVC!

What's more, RCA's video recorders also only have good sales in the North American market, but in other markets around the world, they cannot compete with the products of Japanese companies. Therefore, in general, RCA's benefits in the video recorder business are actually relatively limited.

But if RCA can successfully promote the VCD, then it will get a completely different benefit. In another time and space, the American C-Cube company, which controls the supply of decoding chips, once reached hundreds of millions of dollars per year just from the Chinese mainland market!

And RCA's strength is far from being comparable to those electronics companies in China. In the previous 70's VCR format war, the reason why JVC's NHS format was able to beat Sony's BETA format was that RCA's support inadvertently played a decisive role in it!

RCA's familiarity with the U.S. market is far beyond that of foreign companies. Not only does it know what kind of products the U.S. consumer wants, but it also has a strong channel for everything.

For example, RCA has an RCA record label, which can provide a large amount of music content for newly launched VCD products. Although NBC Broadcasting Company has been spun off and listed independently, with the controlling relationship of Oriental Group, it can also provide a large number of TV series and entertainment program rights for VCD players.

RCA also has various kinds of cooperation with many Hollywood film companies, coupled with the good relationship between Asia Pictures and Universal Pictures, and so on, VCD players will naturally not lack the copyright content of movies! In this way, after the advent of VCD players, there will be no dilemma of having no films to play.

After solving the problem of content supply, with the distribution channels that RCA has built up over the years, and the support of CG (Computer Park), which is increasingly showing its dominance in the consumer electronics market in the United States, it is not so difficult for VCD players to be distributed all over the United States!

What's more, RCA can also attract various allies, it only needs to master the key decoding chip technology, and other technologies can be completely licensed to other companies for production, so as to quickly expand the momentum and compete with video recorders in the global market!

For RCA, the profits that can be created by VCDs with a large number of key technologies are far more valuable than those of VCRs that are controlled by others! The focus of RCA's future development will be in the field of audio-visual products such as televisions, VCDs, and video cameras!

VCD is only the first bullet in Li Xuan's plan, and the Oriental Research Institute is also actively researching technologies such as flash memory and micro hard drives. As these technologies mature, MP3 players will come out to block Sony's Walkman and CD players.

RCA focuses on digital and imaging products, Aikang focuses on computer products, Oriental Research Institute, Oriental Semiconductor, and Fairchild Semiconductor provide upstream technical support, Oriental Gaming, Oriental Commercial Software, and Oriental System Software provide downstream software and content support, and CG Company (Computer Park) and Oriental Commercial are responsible for the entire distribution system.

The entire complete electronics industry chain of the Eastern Group has begun to take shape! )