Red vs. Blue Lasers Complicate DVD's Future

bnavarro writes: "The EE Times is reporting that the DVD Forum's Steering Committee voted this week to approve the use of low-bit-rate compression for high-definition DVD. The DVD Forum's decision, made at a meeting Tuesday (Feb. 26) in Tokyo, to stick with a red-laser-based scheme but switch to low-bit-rate compression, came only a week after nine of the world's biggest electronics companies agreed to promote a blue-laser-based format for next-generation video and computer optical disks."

Comments

Re:I'm an idiot but...

[jimhill]

The color.

Light's color is a function of its frequency, which is inversely proportional to its wavelength. Higher frequency lasers can read pits which are closer together on a disc substrate, allowing them to put more data in the same areal density as lower frequency lasers. Blue is better than red for this purpose.

Alas, it's also harder (read: more expensive) to make blue lasers and the industry has already spent a lot of money on reds, so a blue-laser technology would require the writeoff of existing gear AND the purchase of new. Not an easy sell these days.

But blue lasers are still expensive

[shoppa]

There are two ways to put more video on the disk:

1. More compression. Needs CPU horsepower somewhere (drive? your desktop CPU?), but CPU horsepower is dirt cheap today.
2. Blue lasers. The shorter your wavelength, the higher your recording density. But red lasers are widespread and cheap, while blue lasers in consumer devices are not all that well understood and there is a very limited supply at the moment.

If you're in the business of selling blue lasers, of course you want to promote method #2 above. But DVD companies are not in the business of selling blue lasers - they're in the business of selling content.

Of course, the decision to not use blue lasers impacts those who use the disks for purposes other than what the DVD companies want. If you want to store data on the disk, the "new" DVD compression doesn't help you any. And if you want to play the new DVD's on your non-DVD-consortium-approved player, the new compression techniques will probably make your attempts more complicated (if not more illegal...)

different coloured lasers is good futureproofing

[FrenZon]

Can you imagine how confusing Starwars would be if everyone's lasers were the same colour?

DVD standards are a mess...

[dpbsmith]

...does Joe Six-pack understand the differences between DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM? Do _I_ understand the differences between these formats? Do you? Does the recent el-cheapo DVD player I bought play 2-layer disks? Do I know? WILL I know until I try to put one of them in and find that it won't play?

And now we're going to have TWO competing high-definition DVD formats? And HDTV itself, or do I mean "digital TV," is six or is it eight different formats, which are high-definition, except when they aren't, that is they are high-ER definition but not HIGH definition, only you can't get the high definition, and all the digital TV formats are about to become obsolete...

Anyone who buys ANY HDTV or DVD gear until the dust settles has gotta be nuts.

But you sure have to be amazed at the complexity and ingenuity the industry is using to shoot itself in the foot.