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."

Comments

Re:PS3?

[travisco_nabisco]

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.

Re:This just gets better all the time

[JanneM]

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.