Blue Laser DVDs are coming....soon

Ron-P

Electronics Firms Unify Blue-Laser DVD Standards
Tue Feb 19, 6:48 AM ET


TOKYO (Reuters) - Nine consumer electronics makers including Japanese giants Sony Corp (news - web sites). and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. said on Tuesday they agreed to uniform standards for next-generation blue-laser DVDs.

The pact aims to avoid the fragmentation of standards for DVD (digital versatile disc) recorders that has plagued the current line-up of red-laser products, which feature three separate formats.

Blue-laser light, with a shorter wavelength than the red variety, can be honed into a finer beam, enabling it to read and write more bits of information on a given area of disc space.

"We are not so far away from producing (blue-laser DVDs) in mass quantities," Jan Oosterveld, a member of Philips Electronics NV's group management committee, told a news conference.

He said the consortium's agreement was intended "to end speculation on what we wanted to do with blue laser and to show a uniform face."

The new blue-laser format, which could appear in products as early as next year, will feature up to 27 gigabytes of memory on one side of a single 12-cm disc, nearly six times the capacity of current 4.7 gigabyte disks, and store more than two hours of digital high-definition motion pictures.

Also agreeing to the format were Japan's Hitachi Ltd. , Pioneer Corp. and Sharp Corp. , South Korea (news - web sites)'s Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and LG Electronics Inc. , and France's Thomson Multimedia .

Licensing of the new DVD format will begin in the spring.

Company officials repeatedly ducked questions on when they might launch new blue-laser products, although they are widely expected to appear in tandem with the introduction of digital high-definition broadcasting.

Japan is likely to launch land-based digital broadcasting in 2003 and steadily shift away from analog over the next several years.

Matsushita, owner of the Panasonic brand, and other DVD manufacturers are also developing dual-layer technology using semi-transparent materials to store 50 gigabytes of data on one side of a disc, or about four hours of high-definition video.

Electronics industry officials, eager for a hot new product to help pull them out of the info-tech slump, hope the development of high-capacity DVDs and the move to digital high-definition TV and video -- with their voracious appetite for memory -- will spur a switch to DVDs from video cassettes.

Company officials added it would be technically possible for manufacturers to develop blue-laser systems that are compatible with existing red-laser products, although it would be up to each company to decide its own strategy on compatibility.

Peace Out~:D

juice21

it will be interesting to see how the integration of compatibility between formats and maufacturer's pans out when this hit the market...

no more excuse for WB to be cheap and make 'flip-discs' anymore...

trubluluc

As usual, just when you think you've spent enough to have the best...five minutes later,
you don't.
Still....I like the idea of blue lasers,
they'll match the furniture better.

-luc

Steve@3dai

My couch cushins are blue too, awesome. hahaha

27gig though? I guess that is just one side hehehe

- Steve

CHRIS

As long as I don't have to rebuild my DVD collection, I'm happy with blue, purple, or whatever.

joe logston

yes i heard about the blue lasers but they dont say anything about the solfware thats whats importain they can make all the hardware but with no solfware you dont have nothing they got to get the movie & music industries to prodros the soft ware for the blue laser the industries dont want to do that unless they can sell it and it goes on & on it is hard to change formats it probly take yrs.

gidrah

It's my understanding that the new machines will be able to play the regular DVD and CDs, but older machines won't be able to play newer format software. Similar to the PS/PS2 upgrade.

It'll take awhile and the first ones will be expensive but it'll get there eventually.

Ron-P

It's my understanding that the new machines will be able to play the regular DVD and CDs, but older machines won't be able to play newer format software.

Exactly. The new players will have both a red and blue laser so you are able to play your old dvds in the new players.

I could see this becoming a nitch market for early adopters and videophiles. But to see a new format like this in a BB or CC, it will be a very long time. I doubt the studios want to confuse J6P more than they already have.


Peace Out~:D

gidrah

Yeah, but I think an increase in HDTV signals and availibilty will snowball the effect across the board. IE: cheaper HDTV TVs, blue laser DVDAR/RW, etc. Could you imagine a HighDef. DVD recorder/rewriter. Next I want them to work on that plug that goes into the back of your head like in the Matrix.

gidrah

Not to mention you could fit around a gazillion MP3 files on a single disc.

:eek: