Blue light lasers

Thanks for the article Peter. I am curious about why the LA Times is bringing this up now, because in many circles, blue-lasers are old news.

About a little over a year ago Sony announced that they would be releasing recordable blue-green laser recordable DVD players in 2000, to be followed by pure-blue light laser DVD recorders a few months later.

Well, technology rolled on and a Japanese company passed up the blue laser race and went directly to develop violet-light lasers (with many times the capacity and throughput of blue lasers)that have a useful life that was long enough to use in consumer products. A few months ago they were shipping sample quantities to manufacturers.

The violet-light breakthroughs brought some speculation to the idea of UD-DVD which would potentially support 3500 X 2000 resolution, presumably this technology would be used for medical imaging, geology, and possibly E-Cinema.

Hopefully, this blue-laser article could be a precursor to actual shipping blue-laser DVD products, or maybe some real HD-DVD standards specifications, as opposed to the ongoing rumors, and absense of manufacturer's product announcements regarding HD-DVD, DTV, and copy protection technologies.

-Dean.

just wondering, how much more expensive is the blue/violet laser technoligy compared to current dvd tech. Also, is it something which will evntually come down in price or is the technoligy just more expensive to produce period?

Stuckeys,

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but outside of recouping the R&D and new manufacturing costs there shouldn't be an appreciable added premium for the new lasers.

I hadn't read anything that mentioned any special materials, or manufacturing necessary for the shorter wavelength devices.

-Dean.

[Sir Edmund]

Well, technology rolled on and a Japanese company passed up the blue laser race and went directly to develop violet-light lasers (with many times the capacity and throughput of blue lasers)

I think it's the other way around, in that purple laser is a compromise between red and blue. So it's the blue laser which allows for the most data to be stored on one disc.

I may be wrong though (not exactly an authority on these things)

(edited to remove ugly quote tags)

[This message has been edited by Sir Edmund (edited 08-20-1999).]

Sir Edmund,

Nope, The light color spectrum runs from Infra-red to ultra-violet, with blue being close to the violet end of the visible light spectrum.

So after the CDROM infra red lasers came out, DVD followed with pure red light lasers. The next slated jump was working to manufacture blue-green lasers, and then pure blue. But the much shorter wavelength of violet light offers a much tighter beam and therefore better capacity and throughput capabilities.

-Dean.

[Sir Edmund]

I stand corrected.