Laser Shortage to Stall High-Def Disc War? 148
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."
Animal Cruelty (Score:4, Funny)
They are driving themselves insane out at sea, they were all psyched to go into battle with some kick ass frikkin laser beams on their heads now they have to continue practicing with mop-handles tied on.
Shame on you Sony.
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They are driving themselves insane out at sea, they were all psyched to go into battle with some kick ass frikkin laser beams on their heads now they have to continue practicing with mop-handles tied on.
I think it's detente
Blame all those pacifists in the pacific!
none for me, none for you
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Re:Animal Cruelty (Score:5, Funny)
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Red lasers for sharks are so 1997, just like ill tempered mutated sea bass. All sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads want to look cool, and therefore only use blue lasers.
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Clearly there is an army of sharks (and few dolphins, for good measure) off the coast of California that are being fitted with the entire world's supply of blue lasers. We have to believe an attack is coming any day now. While our government has spent the past few months keeping people from bringing bottled water onto airplanes, they've completely ignored the possibility of an army of trained marine life using the latest advances in weaponr
Sharks! (Score:4, Funny)
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Gimme more cowbell I tell ya.
Illegal collusion to fix the market (Score:5, Funny)
Argh! (Score:3, Funny)
Illegal collusion to fix the market - Wouldn't happen to be intended to delay the adoption of the new players until next year would it, by which time maybe they will figure out how to actually sell a usable product...
There was no way in heck I was going to get one of these damn things anyway.
But now, now I feel I must have one! Aaarrrggghhhhh!
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This is a risky strategy.
Gee, those marketing people (Score:5, Funny)
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meanwhile... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:meanwhile... (Score:5, Insightful)
if they run short they are just putting salt in the wound where they shot them selves in the foot.
if they are just stopping sale to out side people so that they will have what they need for the ps3 they are going to piss their partners off even more.. because they can't stop selling to hd-dvd people and not blue-ray people... that would be anti competive
should be intresting to see how the next 6 months role out..
as for the big N - they have nothing to fear, as always
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Nichia, Sharp and Sanyo != Sony
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Utilizing BD drives in its own PS3 game consoles, Sony suspended shipments of blue laser diodes to other customers
Which means the effective cost of PS3 is higher. Sony is eating the opportunity cost of selling the blue lasers to other customers, who would certainly pay higher-than-otherwise prices due to decreased supply.
Capitalism is set up to encourage people to allocate scarce resources as efficiently as possible. Sony, on the other hand, is allocating scarce resources to 8-year-old Johnny who onl
Looks like someone forgot to RTFA (Score:2)
Freaking 360 fanbois.
Ahh, I get it (Score:4, Funny)
No.... (Score:2)
No, because Sony wants the PS3 which includes Blu-Ray (a technology endorsed by a huge range of studios and other companies including Dell and Apple) to succeed and not be in terribly short supply.
As noted those with a bent toward conspiracy would say an additional reason would be to keep the number of HD-DVD players low while Blu-Ray in the PS3 fills the market.
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This just gets better all the time (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:This just gets better all the time (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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By then there could well be wifi (or something similar) *everywhere*. Your player - be it portable (such as a phone/psp etc), or a box by the TV - will receive data from the net via wireless technology, and you'd subscribe to Fox/Sony/Microsoft/HBO and get your stuff from them direct. Your flat rate subscription, entitling you to play/listen to whatever you wanted whenever you wanted would mean there would be no point
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I'm not so sure about that. There is a lot to be said for the "impulse" buy and all the fancy packaging. While my entire music collection is on my computer/iPod I'm certainly in a minority and I've had to fight tooth and nail to get my fiance to follow suit. Perhaps we will instead of little ram drives that contain the movie which is downloaded to our players? I'm also not sure that a subscription service will really work for movies as I
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But three important differences allow them to hold quite a bit more information than DVDs:
* They use 405 nanometer blue-violet lasers rather than 650 nanometer red lasers.
* The pits are smaller and the tracks are closer together.
* They use more efficient compression to cut down the size of the files they store.
Laserdiscs (Score:2)
You do know Laserdiscs had a successful 20 year run in the videophile market, only usurped by DVDs less than ten years ago?
A 20 year run for a technology is pretty good, even if joe six pack doesn't use it.
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Most all of my local Video rental shops at the time had significant LD choices. They would get the LD releases as soon as they came out, and purchase prices were dropping.
DVD hit..and wham...you could get them for dollars....hell, I've still got my old LD player, and some LD's that I've not replaced with DVD yet...and some that aren't replaceable...
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Cinemanow and Movielink do not have very many videos either, but t
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And you are righ
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Re:This just gets better all the time (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, Blu-Ray sucks worse in the protection department than HD-DVD. I believe HD-DVD has eliminated the region coding as everyone disliked it and it never worked that well anyhow. HD-DVD players still have a region, but that's for DVDs. I believe the box of the HD-DVD player I saw said "DVD only region" with the region mark, and I don't recall any mark on the HD-DVD discs themselves. Even the HD-DVD/DVD combo discs have a region code marked with "DVD Only". So it looks like HD-DVD has no region coding at all.
At the very least, the DVD Forum learned something for their next-gen format. Too bad Sony didn't, and not only kept region coding, but added additional protections over what HD-DVD has (they both have ICT and AACS, and Blu-Ray adds to that, too).
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Well, quality-wise I doubt you'll get anything better... 1080p is for normal TV distances beyond human vision everywhere but the small field dead center in your vision, and even then you need to be have 20-20 sight and sit fairly close to the screen. If you do the math sitting right next to a computer montior then the limit would be about 2160p though.
If the Blu-Ray tools
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Due to the way human vision works, the resolution in the center of the field of vision *is* the resolution of human vision. The only way you could take advantage of the lower edge resolution would be if you could predict, with certanty, exactly where the viewer would be looking all the time.
Re:This just gets better all the time (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, definitely. I was working at Circuit City at the time (1998 or so, I think) and between the obvious picture quality difference, DTS/Dolby Digital sound, and not having to rewind anymore, it was a killer product. The prices on players were still a little too prohibitive for non-enthusiasts so you didn't see grandmas buying DVD, but younger folks were really into it. Another thing that helped the adoption of DVD was that prices of movies on DVD were substantially cheaper than they were on VHS. I remember "The Matrix" pretty much hovered around $9.99 ever since it came out. You used to have to pay $25 or more for a VHS tape, and many VHS titles plain didn't get stocked because they were priced at $99 for video stores. DVDs flattened the price point and made it so video stores bought the same thing regular consumers did. DVDs were definitely a big deal. I don't see anywhere near the same excitement over Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
Re:This just gets better all the time (Score:4, Interesting)
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I've NEVER seen a $25 VHS tape in stores, and I don't remember seeing a single $10 DVD until nearly 2 years after The Matrix was released, and that was some lowsy movie which happened to bomb, and they wanted to get rid of.
I get the feeling your memory is exactly backwards. Either that or CC was doing something crazy with pricing to try hard to push DVD/DIVX.
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You don't? My brother paid nearly $100 for Schindlers List on VHS when it first came out. VHS tapes used to be extremely expensive.
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Most of those VHS tapes were priced for video rental places, where after a dozen rentals max you made a profit. Once the installed home base of VHS was significant, the prices dropped enormously.
This had happened by the early 90's at the latest, incidentally.
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I remember when Star Wars was $80 for a Beta tape in 1981.
I paid $29 each for Star Trek:TMP and III in 1984.
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Beta != VHS
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That was still relatively late in the DVD game. The first few DVDs I bought (Austin Powers, Face/Off, 12 Monkeys) were $30 or more apiece.
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Re:This just gets better all the time (Score:5, Insightful)
There were early adopters who went out and bought the obscenely priced first generation DVD players, but by and large the rest of the world didn't really follow suit until the players dropped below about $200 and Blockbuster started stocking a lot of new releases on DVD. And I wouldn't say that DVDs became ubiquitous until the cheap chinese ($50) "WalMart Special" DVD players came onto the scene.
Frankly, early on I think the biggest benefit to most people of DVDs versus VHS is that you didn't have to rewind it. I know my parents just thought that was the coolest damn thing; you could talk to them about digital audio until you were blue in the face, but what they liked was the ability to jump instantly to any point in a film, pause it for extended lengths of time without "wearing" the disc, and never having to worry about rewind anything.
I think whichever HD-disc format wins, it'll end up being like that. Mainstream consumers aren't going to buy it, until there are movies down at Blockbuster that they can rent, and they can buy the player at Walmart for under $200-250. Normal people just don't spend much more than that on what's effectively a fancy videocassette player (even if it's not really a cassette player...in most people's minds, the function is exactly the same, to play movies).
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Still, with DVD-Rs costing under $.40 for over 10 hours of capacity (xvid format) and with them much easier to copy (which makes up for them being more fragile), I'll take them any day over tape.
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Your average DVD player will remember where you are for the last five or ten discs you watch.
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When was the last time you were at the store? I recently (6 months ago) bought a Philips progressive-scan DVD player that supports xvid and divx etc, for $80. That's right.. $80.
In fact, the *only* dvd players that were more than $120 were DVD recorders.
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http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=767
Those who do not learn from their OWN history.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Those who do not learn from their OWN history.. (Score:4, Funny)
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That does it! (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad enough that Sony is shoving an over-priced PS3 down consumers throats. Now they're throttling the market for other players. The Sony monopoly must die!
Or, at least, cut the damn prices on the PS3.
Obligatory comment (Score:1)
Clearly this is bad news for Sony. (Score:3, Funny)
Because... you know, everything is, somehow.
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Exactly! (Score:2)
Are the sharks (or snakes) missing? (Score:1, Redundant)
The blues (Score:1, Redundant)
I think "war" might not be the right word.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Plain and simple FUD. HD-DVD and Blu-ray players will play all your current DVDs just fine. Implying that you have to go rebuy your collection is unbelivably stupid.
And the whole basis for this belief of yours is...?
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And the whole basis for this belief of yours is...?
He read it on the internet over a high-speed wireless connection on a high-resolution multi-color display on a personal digital device nonexistant 20 years ago and that cost relative pennies compared to the delivery of information in yesteryear, and thought to himself, "Self
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Plain and simple FUD. HD-DVD and Blu-ray players will play all your current DVDs just fine. Implying that you have to go rebuy your collection is unbelivably stupid.
Why would I buy a next-gen player to play my old DVDs?
If I bother to buy a next-gen player, I want as many movies in that new format as I can. Movies in next-gen formats are going to take time to get here, and the quality difference from DVDs -> HD-DVD/Blu-ray isn't as great (certainly not as much as VHS -> DVD), so I have less incen
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Because you can buy highdef DVDs in the future, instead of more standard DVDs. There is absolutely no reason you need to re-buy the DVDs you already have.
Completely, totally, factually, WRONG.
VHS to DVD was a 3X improvement at BEST... DVD to hi-def (1080) is a 6X improvement.
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You can say it all you want, but it won't make it true.
Yes, DVDs fix that by introducing aliasing on the edges instead, macroblock artifacts, chroma sub-sampling, etc.
Only an ignorant fool who has never seen an HDTV picture would
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When the difference is overwhelmingly obvious, yes. Particularly when you aren't asking for any such thing where VHS is involved.
That's doubly true when you've already stated: "the quality difference from DVDs -> HD-DVD/Blu-ray isn't as great". Backtracking now, and saying you want confirmation, is a pretty transparent move.
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What I really want is to throw all my movies on a hard drive. Then I'll throw the discs into storage and play the movies directly to my TV from my server. I can do that right now with DVDs. The DRM in next-gen formats actively hinders that (though I'm sure it'll be broken with little to no decrease in quality).
I'll spare comments on the quality increases, since I've already stated my opinions in another reply above.
just in time (Score:5, Funny)
Great! That's just in time for me to NOT BUY ONE.
In a related move (Score:2, Funny)
Wrong Joke for "Blue Laser" (Score:2, Funny)
Does this mean I can no longer buy all their playsets and toys?!
-Peter
Re:Wrong Joke for "Blue Laser" (Score:4, Funny)
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Sony's strategy (Score:5, Funny)
2. Declare ultimate hardware DRM system (no lasers) ensuring that drives cannot read or write any discs.
3. Openly fret that prices are too low.
4. ???
5. Profit!
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Format wars ... when will people learn? (Score:2, Funny)
hmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Buy and Torrent (Score:4, Interesting)
PS3 (Score:2)
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30% yield? (Score:3, Interesting)
Could some knowledgable person briefly explain why a 30% yield for blue laser diodes is something to crow about? What, exactly, keeps yields so low for such a "fundamental" device? They fab chips with millions of elements and get better yields...
-k
Re:30% yield? (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty much declares Blu-Ray the winner (Score:2)
Except one system, Blu-Ray, gets millions of players out thanks to the PS3 (who Sony is holding the diodes in reserve for). What happens when you have two sides and one of them has a few orders of magnitude more consumers buying media for it?
Wow, how many ways can a post go wrong (Score:2)
Really? I can buy a Blu-Ray movie for $20, about the same as a DVD. Also what you and many others forget is the power of Netflix - at first people will only rent Blu-Ray DVD's, but then when they see the increase in quality they will happily pay a few dollars more for a leap in video quality.
After you buy your over priced consule; you then have a price point of $60-$100 dollars for games. What 'I
Re:PS3? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Won't anyone think of the poor PS3? (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus, the artificial shortage they are creating will likely increase the prices for whatever lasers they do decide to sell to others, while the shortage of lasers means less competition for Sony players.
How is Sony losing, here?
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Sony suspending shipments of diodes to horde them for itself doesn't disadvantage Bluray, it hurts other makers regardless of format; Sony is still making both standalone players and the PS3, and all of those will be Bluray, and none HD-DVD.
While the overall shortages may drive up prices and slow overall adoption of next-gen DVD players, Sony doesn't seem to be hurting the chances of Bluray w
Re:There is *NO SHORTAGE* (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes, and they're called the MPAA. Studios always buy sony monitors to appear in films. With that much of a guaranteed sale, Sony will do just fine.
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