So many companies had plans in the early ninetees to release CD-i players: It's hard to believe how it came to be that only Philips was the main player that still supported CD-i until the end! Yamaha, Pioneer, Panasonic, Sanyo, Samsung, Sony, the list is so long! All these companies intended to support CD-i but somehow left the CD-i train before it was released, except for the two Sony CD-i portables of course. This is another nice find by Patrick Selten, who dug up some more CD-i prototypes before. This Panasonic player at least supports CD-i by using a seperate hardware CD-i ward, I'm not sure how it would look like but the PCMCIA player supports quite some formats. The fact CD-i was included shows that it was built at the start of the format war, and unfortunately, CD-i did not survive it to the end.
Jorg kennis also remembered that he at least have seen Panasonic demo-ing a CD-i player before:
Jorg: "I was present at a Panasonic CD-i demo at Firato 1992 (electronics show in Amsterdam), they were using a Panasonic-branded player. "
About this player: "Interesting. But I assume this is just a "regular" CD-ROM player (albeit with a PCMCIA connector to connect it to a laptop in an era that USB was not yet standard), and that it does not have CD-i specific features, just "hardware" capable of reading CD-i discs (like most CD-ROM drives). Nevertheless an interesting find!"
[Thanks, Patrick Selten & Jorg Kennis from out CD-i Appreciation Group]
