NEC Develops Combo Drive for Next and Current DVD's

"Japanese electronics conglomerate NEC Corp. said on Thursday it had
developed an optical disc drive capable of playing back and recording
both next-generation and existing DVDs.

The recorder comes with the world's first single optical head that
combines both a red laser -- which reads and writes the current
generation of DVDs -- and a blue laser, which does so for
next-generation discs.

NEC said it expects to launch a commercial product sometime in 2005,
but that the timing of its rollout would depend on the amount of
next-generation DVD content available at the time. The first products
will likely be used in PCs, NEC said.

Earlier this year, Sony Corp. began sales of the world's first
high-definition video DVD recorder that uses blue-laser technology.

The proliferation of high-definition television is expected to spur
demand for video recorders using blue lasers, since recording capacity
of next-generation DVDs is almost four times that of existing discs.
Sony is part of a consortium that includes some of the world's biggest
consumer electronics makers, such as Philips and Matsushita Electric
Industrial Co. Ltd., maker of the Panasonic brand, to back a
technology called Blu-ray.

NEC and Toshiba, on the other hand, support a rival standard called
HD-DVD, which last month won the backing of the DVD Forum, an industry
association of some 220 electronics and media companies.

By combining two lasers into a single optical head, NEC said its new
disc drives would be smaller and thinner than other drives that use
two optical heads. The drive is powered by a system chip developed by
NEC's semiconductor unit, NEC Electronics Corp."

[
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4012806
]






"Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game
because they almost always turn out to be -- or to be indistinguishable from
-- self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time."
- Neil Stephenson, _Cryptonomicon_