It expands the current DVD player datapipe from 9.6 mb/sec to 36 mb/sec. Blue Laser can transmit more info than red.
Electronics Firms Unify Blue-Laser DVD Standards
Tue Feb 19, 6:48 AM ET
TOKYO (Reuters) - Nine consumer electronics makers including Japanese giants Sony Corp (news - web sites). and Matsu****a Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. said on Tuesday they agreed to uniform standards for next-generation blue-laser DVDs.
The pact aims to avoid the fragmentation of standards for DVD (digital versatile disc) recorders that has plagued the current line-up of red-laser products, which feature three separate formats.
Blue-laser light, with a shorter wavelength than the red variety, can be honed into a finer beam, enabling it to read and write more bits of information on a given area of disc space.
"We are not so far away from producing (blue-laser DVDs) in mass quantities," Jan Oosterveld, a member of Philips Electronics NV\'s group management committee, told a news conference.
He said the consortium\'s agreement was intended "to end speculation on what we wanted to do with blue laser and to show a uniform face."
The new blue-laser format, which could appear in products as early as next year, will feature up to 27 gigabytes of memory on one side of a single 12-cm disc, nearly six times the capacity of current 4.7 gigabyte disks, and store more than two hours of digital high-definition motion pictures.
Also agreeing to the format were Japan\'s Hitachi Ltd. , Pioneer Corp. and Sharp Corp. , South Korea (news - web sites)\'s Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and LG Electronics Inc. , and France\'s Thomson Multimedia .
Licensing of the new DVD format will begin in the spring.
Company officials repeatedly ducked questions on when they might launch new blue-laser products, although they are widely expected to appear in tandem with the introduction of digital high-definition broadcasting.
Japan is likely to launch land-based digital broadcasting in 2003 and steadily shift away from analog over the next several years.
Matsu****a, owner of the Panasonic brand, and other DVD manufacturers are also developing dual-layer technology using semi-transparent materials to store 50 gigabytes of data on one side of a disc, or about four hours of high-definition video.
Electronics industry officials, eager for a hot new product to help pull them out of the info-tech slump, hope the development of high-capacity DVDs and the move to digital high-definition TV and video -- with their voracious appetite for memory -- will spur a switch to DVDs from video cassettes.
Company officials added it would be technically possible for manufacturers to develop blue-laser systems that are compatible with existing red-laser products, although it would be up to each company to decide its own strategy on compatibility.
From a purist\'s POV, even though DVD looks much better than VHS to the average consumer they are still low resolution, not even coming close to film, the medium a movie is shot in. Add to that the video is compressed as well as the audio and you can see why 4.7gigs (9gigs with RSDL) per side is just not enough.
One step closer always has its ups and downs. We still have a loooong way to go, many argue 27gigs (or 44gigs with FMD) is
still not enough.
The new players should be compatible with current DVDs.
Prototypes with safe casing:
Blu-rayhttp://www.audiorevolution.com/news/0302/01.blu-ray.shtmlhttp://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/OEG20020301S0091FMDhttp://www.c-3d.net/tech_frameset.htmlhttp://sysopt.earthweb.com/articles/c3d-spot/index.htmlProposed new DVD Encoding schemehttp://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011212S0060
