More interesting details in this pricelist that was offered to professional/retail environments: Philips offered this POS display as well as a pricelist for CD-i hardware. One remarkable detail is the mentioning of a FW390i 7-disc changer. We know its little brother, the FW380i, which was actually released (shown below) and we also heard about plans to release a 5-disc CD-i changer as part of the CD-i 740 development process. But this FW390i is new. It would be another unique feature if Philips actually released a CD-i disc changer in any form, unfortunately it was yet another promise but it never happened!
Jorg Kennis told us about this: "There were plans to release a 5-disc CD-i disc changer (a carrousel) and it seems that with the release of the CD-i 740, the CD-i commander was already prepared to switch discs. "The 'mounting' of a seperate/other CD-i disc was already described in the Green Book. Also in the CSD there is a space reserved for this".
CD-i disc changers were far more popular in USA rather than in Europe, so especially for the USA market this was an interesting option for Philips. Unfortunately, when it was considered in 1998, there was hardly any CD-i activity left in the USA...
We wonder how far the development of this CD-i 5-disc or 7-disc carrousel actually went. If it was tested in the software (as the CD-i commander actually has buttons designed for it) there should be at least be a real prototype somewhere. These 'disc up' and 'disc down' button on the CD-i commander suggest that something was in the pipeline!
[Thanks, Steep Haywire]