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To: mtnlady who wrote (1781)	2/4/2000 12:02:00 AM
From: FatSam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10713

I am far from an expert in the subject but I think that the usefulness of the blue laser may relate to the fact that as light waves go across the color spectrum from blue to red they become "longer" - that is a blue light wave is much shorter that a red light wave. Because of the shorter wavelength there are more blue light waves in any given unit of time than red light waves during the same interval - which makes the blue wavelength laser much more efficient than the commonly used red wavelength laser for reading from a CD-ROM, for example. Hopefully some of the more scientifically inclined on this thread can expand on this (or tell me if I'm all wet)!

To: mtnlady who wrote (1781)	2/4/2000 12:38:00 AM
From: mauser96	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10713

If memory serves, the reason a blue powered laser might beat one of the kind in use today is that the latter uses near infrared, which has a much longer frequency than a blue light. This alone would double the number of grooves or pits on the Cd that can be read by the laser. However, since the surface of the CD is functionally 2 dimensional, the total increase would be about 4 times better for the blue laser. All this is nice, but is there a lot of demand for a CD holding 280 minutes worth of music? Most computer programs wouldn't come close to filling one, so I see their use mainly to store digital data that doesn't need to be changed (historical data?) or for images. An alternative would be a CD no bigger than a half dollar storing as much as one of our present 4.5' disks..This probably has lots more potential. I hope CREE reduces price of LED as fast as possible. At this stage market share and volume are the key.