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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 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.
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.