Slashdot Mirror
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 will do nothing to the PS3, the article said that Sony has suspended shipments of Blue Laser Diodes to other manufacturers, aka they are keeping them for their own products.
This is turning out to be all stuff and nonsense, and I think I'll just skip HD-DVD and Blu-ray one and wait for the next next generation, when maybe somebody with half a brain is involved. DVD is perfectly good enough for me, thank you very much.
Agree with the sentiment.
It is quite unlikely for there to ever be a next generation, though. The lead time is, oh, ten years or so, and by that time it seems more than likely that using a physical carrier for video is not going to be a mainstream technology anymore. There's going to be physical data carriers, of course, but not aimed at selling video.
What might happen, though, is that these two formats both end up stillborn - laser discs of the 21st century - and pushes the major manufacturers to quickly (as in within a year or two) replace them with a common format that avoids the most egregious mistakes of these two. But that would be replacement, not a generation shift.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I have 3 HD TVs, (1 Projection gotten early 2001, 1 LCD and 1 Plasma - both this year) and I can attest that I won't be moving from DVD soon. The leap of VCR->DVD style improvements (CD like control) just isn't there. The DVD was backwards in some respects like regional encoding (please don't tell me that lack of regional coding on VHS tapes made it easier for pirates) and forcing you to watch the FBI warning and promos and the extra resolution isn't worth it if it gets worse than this.
And you are right. The next generation is even worse with DRM. Why does it seem every anti-Piracy measure only punishes the paying consumers? Wonders what incentive there is NOT to pirate. Please don't say the "making of" features or other stupid "extras". I don't watch that on 99% of DVDs.
Before I am asked, I bought the HD for the widescreen and programming like Discovery HD.
Bad news? When they are limiting the availability of the diodes to their competitors when they will be able to flood the market with PS3's, so they become the default next-gen high definition player?
Sony are being very clever here. They are doing all they can to abuse their position to assume dominance.
Yes, definitely. I was working at Circuit City at the time (1998 or so, I think) and between the obvious picture quality difference, DTS/Dolby Digital sound, and not having to rewind anymore, it was a killer product. The prices on players were still a little too prohibitive for non-enthusiasts so you didn't see grandmas buying DVD, but younger folks were really into it. Another thing that helped the adoption of DVD was that prices of movies on DVD were substantially cheaper than they were on VHS. I remember "The Matrix" pretty much hovered around $9.99 ever since it came out. You used to have to pay $25 or more for a VHS tape, and many VHS titles plain didn't get stocked because they were priced at $99 for video stores. DVDs flattened the price point and made it so video stores bought the same thing regular consumers did. DVDs were definitely a big deal. I don't see anywhere near the same excitement over Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
I wonder how much of this is a shortage of lasers vs. sonys desire to keep HD-DVD products off the shelf util they can get a price matching (or as near as they can get) competing products to market. Maybe I need a tin foil hat but I've seen similar tactics used in the businesses I've worked for.
I'm thinking if there's anything on HD that I really want to see, I'll just buy it and then download it. Then I'm supporting the movie or show I like, I don't have to buy either player, and I have it in the format I prefer -- MPEG4 on my hard drive.
Nichia, which currently holds 80% of the global blue laser diode supply, reported that its yield rate for blue laser diodes reached 30%
Could some knowledgable person briefly explain why a 30% yield for blue laser diodes is something to crow about? What, exactly, keeps yields so low for such a "fundamental" device? They fab chips with millions of elements and get better yields...
-k
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Actually, Blu-Ray sucks worse in the protection department than HD-DVD. I believe HD-DVD has eliminated the region coding as everyone disliked it and it never worked that well anyhow. HD-DVD players still have a region, but that's for DVDs. I believe the box of the HD-DVD player I saw said "DVD only region" with the region mark, and I don't recall any mark on the HD-DVD discs themselves. Even the HD-DVD/DVD combo discs have a region code marked with "DVD Only". So it looks like HD-DVD has no region coding at all.
At the very least, the DVD Forum learned something for their next-gen format. Too bad Sony didn't, and not only kept region coding, but added additional protections over what HD-DVD has (they both have ICT and AACS, and Blu-Ray adds to that, too).