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Laser Shortage to Stall High-Def Disc War?
An anonymous reader writes "DigiTimes reports that several major vendors, including Sony and Matsushita, have suspended shipments of the blue laser diodes that drive both high-def disc formats. The rumored laser shortage could result in shipment delays for new models of Blu-ray and HD DVD players and drives past the upcoming holiday season, cooling the next-gen DVD format war until 2007."
It's a REALLY short article, is it really that hard to read? "Utilizing BD drives in its own PS3 game consoles, Sony suspended shipments of blue laser diodes to other customers, the makers indicated, adding that only Nichia, Sharp and Sanyo continue shipping the diodes."
The idea that Microsoft is even close to Nintendo on this is purest fantasy.
The XBox 360 has a DVD instead of an HD-DVD drive for one and exactly one reason: Because they decided to ship in 2005 instead of 2006. Microsoft is almost as big a bunch of media-control freaks as Sony, it's just that both their successes and their failures on that front have been less flashy.
taken from howstuffworks:
But three important differences allow them to hold quite a bit more information than DVDs:
* They use 405 nanometer blue-violet lasers rather than 650 nanometer red lasers.
* The pits are smaller and the tracks are closer together.
* They use more efficient compression to cut down the size of the files they store.
I got a progressive-scan DVD player for 39 dollars. Two years ago.
I think the article is saying that the yield has so far improved to 30% from the x% it was during R&D. But 30% yield does not create enough to meet the expected demand, so the companies aren't willing to release such a small # of HD drives.
Due to the way human vision works, the resolution in the center of the field of vision *is* the resolution of human vision. The only way you could take advantage of the lower edge resolution would be if you could predict, with certanty, exactly where the viewer would be looking all the time.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.