Blue Laser

[Jerry Jones]

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-984520.html?tag=fd_ots

Manufacturers looking for a higher-capacity recordable DVD format will want to mark Feb. 17 on their calendars.

The nine companies promoting Blu-ray Disc technology--a
next-generation recordable DVD format using blue-violet
lasers--announced Thursday that licensing will begin Feb. 17. Blu-ray Disc technology allows for 27GB storage capacities on a single-sided 12cm disc. DVDs hold 4.7GB of data. Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Pioneer, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, Sony and Thomson are known as the "Blu-ray Disc Founders" and have been pursuing a broad acceptance of the format.

Blu-ray technology uses a short-wavelength blue-violet laser instead of the red lasers in current optical drives to read data off discs. The higher-capacity Blu-ray discs will enable the recording of
high-definition broadcasts, which offer better picture quality than
the more broadly available TV broadcasts.

The licensing agreements, which are 10-year renewable contracts, will include the right to use the Blu-ray format and logo as well as the content protection specifications. Licenses for the format and logo will range from $20,000 to $60,000 depending on which products--discs, players or components--manufacturers want to develop. The same is true for the protection pecifications, which range in price annually from $4,000 to $12,000.

Companies already have been developing products using Blu-ray
technology. Philips has demonstrated a prototype miniature Blu-ray disc drive that uses a 3cm disc that can store up to 1GB of data. Typical CDs, measuring 12cm in diameter, can hold up to 650MB of data. The prototype drive is suitable for use in portable devices such as digital cameras, handhelds and cell phones. Philips has been working to shrink the drive.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Sony Chief Operating Officer Kunitake Ando said recordable DVD Blu-ray Disc products will likely appear this year, initially in Japan. Ando said the technology is ready, but some licensing issues still need to be worked out.

Note: There are competing 'Blue' format wars already brewing:

http://www.hddvd.org/hddvd/formats/

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[gt40]

Does that make tommorow 'blue monday'??

[Ray Austin]

wow I was wondering when these were going to make an apperance.

Although I like the flourescent die technology better due to much larger data storage.

Good news is that DVD should become really cheap now.

[thop]

Someone move this ti General Hardware, else people might miss those interesting news

I'm wondering how much $ those recording devices will be. And does that mean the already death of DVD?

[gt40]

I don't think DVD will die anytime soon. The media is more than adequate for it's current uses.
Blue lasers initial uses are as stated - in portable storage devices. And we likely won't see it here (North America) untill next year

[Sasq]

I think this is fine where it is for now.

It will directly affect these guys more then the general population for now.

As for the death of DVD, how long has dvd been out, and only now its begining to reach a reasonable satuartion point in home entertainment systems.

It will be a while before there is an update there.

Dan

[Brian Ellis]

Of course, we'll have to wait for the battle between BLU-R, BLU-RW, BLU+R, BLU+RW, BLU-RAM or something similar to die down And then there will be the compatibility issues with stand-alone and inbuilt players and also different blanks manufacturers.

This is only an opportunity for the makers to purchase expensive licences: it is not an announcement that you will be able to buy anything And at the cost those are, the price will be reflected in what we pay.

I'm not optimistic that these will take off before another few years have elapsed, if then - I may be dead or ga-ga by then

[Jerry Jones]

One positive note...

The 'Blue' proposal by the nine companies and the 'Blue' proposal by NEC and Toshiba include provisions for manufacturers to build players that are backward compatible with existing DVD discs.

They would be absolute fools not to do so.

Nobody will buy their new machines otherwise, particularly those people who already have large DVD collections.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Ray Austin]

Yeah, don't fret DVD people's the only reason why this format is coming is due to the higher data needs for Hi-Def. There really isn't anyway for DVD to work in that arena without using several disks.

Going forward from there will be Flourescent Dye technology as well as Hologram technology that will have starting data size at around 100 GB and moving up from there to around 1TB all on a disk the size of a DVD.

DVD will continue to have a market just as CD's still have a market today. However, the long lived floppy will more than likely fade into the junk pile as we move to larger capacities and faster writes and reads from the newer media.

Right now one of the bottle necks in the PC is the hard-drive. Flourescent Dye technology could be a major break-thru and take over the hard-drive business eventually as you will be able to write many streams of data at once not to mention reading it while you are writing it to the disk. This will vastly change computing as we now know it.

DVD will be here for a long time, but will be much cheaper once the Blu-ray products hit the shelves. Prices for DVD and the media is very competitive now and will be even more so moving forward.

[Brian Ellis]

Ray, where on earth do you get these figures from? A CD/DVD has about 8900 mm2 per layer. Divide that by 1 terabyte and you get a square space of of about 0.000012 mm/bit length. The wavelength of extreme visible violet light is about 0.0004 mm. Even if you go an order of magnitude shorter into the far UV, you're still a long way from what you need, even assuming absolutely perfect optics and mechanics and several layers. It should also be mentioned that far UV is very dangerous, even at low intensities. Natural UV radiation from the sun cuts off at about 0.00029 mm and we all know that this can cause blindness and melanomas, so anything less than 0.0001 mm becomes really hairy. On a more practical note, most substances are fairly opaque to radiation at this wavelength and optical components may be very difficult to manufacture, including the polycarbonates for the disks themselves. I think we have a LONG time to wait for this.

Brian

[Ray Austin]

Here's one to savor... I had another one but the link has gone bad for some reason...

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.asp?RelatedID=1966

Brian just so you know we are talking about recording data to a 3D space not just a flat space such as cd and dvd and regular hard-drives. That is the beauty behind this technology. It will be way superior to ANYTHING available now.

No need to appologize...

Here's another I just managed to round up...

http://www.semiconductorfabtech.com/datatech/industry.news/2001/02/15.02.shtml

[Brian Ellis]

Ray

Are you sure that your first link isn't simply a spoof or a scam?

" The technology, in this form is costly, unreliable, and not compatible with existing disc media. "That was the reason why it has been said that an optical disc based on holography is difficult for commercialization," Machida continued.

Optware told IDG News that they have developed a reliable method of storing data in 3D on existing CD/DVD media. While conventional optical disc systems use a single red laser beam to write a dot, containing 1 bit of information, to a disc's surface, Optware's technology, dubbed "polarized collinear holography", splits the signal laser beam into 1 million narrower beams."

What is said here just cannot hold water, especially if they use a red laser (wavelength between 0.0006 and 0.0007 mm), because the "million narrower beams" still cannot be narrower than is dictated by the wavelength. There are laws in physics.

Like Thomas, I'll believe it when I see it.

As for fluorescent disk technology, this would seem much more plausible, provided that the dyes chosen have an instantaneous response to excitation and stopping excitation. My first guess is that it may be feasible to have a bit density approaching the double of a blu-ray, provided that the radiation problems can be safely overcome and the mechanics can be made stable enough in mass production (no mean feat).

The apologies will be due when these products are commercially available. For every 100 ideas that are published, there are 99 which fall by the wayside long before they hit the store shelves.

See http://www.delphion.com/gallery

[landrover]

"I'm not optimistic that these will take off before another few years have elapsed, if then - I may be dead or ga-ga by then"

Brian, are you ever optimistic?

I'm only 35 years old, maybe that explains why I keep thinking we have good things ahead of us. Not stating that it will be that way, of course. I've been disappointed quite a few times myself...

[Brian Ellis]

Oh! but yes, Landrover. Strange as it may seem to you, I'm always optimistic, like I hope to be shot dead by a jealous husband, when I'm 100 Seriously, in my three score and ten years plus, I've learnt not to take all statements, especially those with a commercial bias, at their face value. I've also learnt that people will use any pseudo-scientific statement to further their aims or simply to bamboozle the populace. As a scientist and an engineer, I've been trained to apply critical thinking to what I read; that is not being pessimistic but realistic. For example, a popular scientific scam of a few years ago was the notion of nuclear fusion in a lab beaker. Many gullible persons fell for it, hook, line and sinker, and even a few scientists did, to the extent that they tried unsuccessfully to duplicate the experiment.

This is not to be confused with the spoof, which exaggerates scientific facts to the ridiculous. I've recently written one such, at http://www.bnellis.com/msc/ . Another, excellent, one is at http://www.dhmo.org/ . However, scientific spoofing can be done well only by scientists, the same as musical clowning can be done only by accomplished musicians.

Now for an example of Brian the Terrible's optimism: MSP7. I've been using it for a couple of months. It is fantastic and is, I dare use the term unscientifically, a quantum leap forward, but I say this because I have the empirical proof, not because I've read Ulead's web site or what has been published on this forum. I therefore predict that it will be a best-seller. Now, if you are like me, you will take what I say here with a pinch of salt, until you try it for yourself. But, if you see Doc, Jerry, other beta testers and Brian saying all similar praise, you will formulate a thought that there may be sufficient circumstantial evidence to at least form a hypothesis. That hypothesis can be verified only by yourself, but I'm confident that you will, if the software interests you, verify it. In the meanwhile, until this opportunity presents itself (2 or 3 weeks, now ), it is still unproven for you and you therefore may remain pessimistic, for whatever reason you think.

So, terrible I may be, pessimistic I am not, as a general rule, unless you consider my demise at 100 to be pessimistic, when it could be at 105

[wkulecz]

"Many gullible persons fell for it, hook, line and sinker, and even a few scientists did, to the extent that they tried unsuccessfully to duplicate the experiment."

Independent duplications of claims is the hallmark of the "Scientific Method"! Cold Fusion was a bold claim, that would have changed the world had it been true (think of Middle Eastern Oil being unneeded).


I'd hardly call anyone in a position to attempt to duplicate the results "gullible" for trying. This quick lack of duplication went a long way toward preventing mis-direction of research monies to government sponsored "comercialization" work.

The most critical review of their initial report (that I read) said they simply observed naturally occuring muon catalyzed fusion which is rather well known, but a sink-hole in terms of net positive energy production. The hope was they had blundered on to something that enabled the muon to catalyze multiple reactions without being consumed, much like a chemical catalyst works. As I understand it, muon catalyzation is a bit of a misnomer since the muon is consumed in fusing the deuterium and since it takes more energy to produce the muon than is released in the fusion, its going nowhere as an energy production method.

--wally.