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To: BillyG who wrote (26685)	12/15/1997 2:41:00 PM
From: Stoctrash	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

New Blue" Laser Technique Could Soon Be Commercial yahoo.com WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new short wave blue" laser technique will soon be commercially usable and could revolutionize many electronic products, an expert said. Writing in the journal Science, Gerhard Fasol of Eurotechnology Japan said the technique, first developed in Japan a year ago, is certain to have a large impact on the world as we know it." The color of laser light corresponds to the size of its wavelength, from blues at the shorter end of the spectrum to red at the long end. Different laser devices require different wavelengths. For example, compact disc players currently use infrared lasers but would work better with wavelengths as blue as possible, as would many other electronic products, Fasol said. Light at the blue end of the spectrum should allow for denser data storage. The new laser is a gallium nitride blue light semiconductor laser that operates at room temperature. Shuji Nakamura and colleagues at Nichia Chemical Industries showed they could make the laser last for up to 3,000 hours, with an estimated potential of 10,000 hours. This now reaches the realm of commercial application, where lifetimes of 10,000 to 20,000 hours are required," Fasol, who has co-authored a book with Nakamura on the technology, wrote. These devices have large ready-made commercial markets: displays, high-density data storage, laser printing, communications and lighting, just to name a few. There may well be several other applications that have not yet been imagined. " Nakamura, who uses the chemical gallium nitride to make his laser, is ahead of big companies who are also trying to develop blue diodes, such as Sony, Toshiba and Xerox, Fasol said. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: BillyG who wrote (26685)	12/15/1997 3:30:00 PM
From: DiViT	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

DVD must get its act together to hit it big Alexander Wolfe ÿ 12/15/97 Electronic Engineering Times Page 41 Copyright 1997 CMP Publications Inc. ÿ Their rosy expectations to the contrary, proponents of the digital video disk ( DVD ) will find their Christmas stockings filled with a big lump of coal this year. Simply put, though the technology is impressive, DVD is turning out to be a dud in the marketplace. Sure, some 1.2 million DVD -ROM drives have shipped to date, according to authoritative estimates. And supporters say that millions more will appear in PCs in 1998. But those figures pale against what could have been achieved, had DVD marketeers gotten their acts together early in the game. Instead, confusion reigned as overlapping marketing thrusts for DVD on PCs and for higher-priced, standalone consumer DVD drives kept buyers away in droves. The situation mirrors the mid-1980s, when the CD-ROM got off to a similarly slow start. If DVD is to live up to its initial promise, several stumbling blocks must be removed. According to Ken Wirt, vice president of marketing at Diamond Multimedia Systems, "What's missing is software-there aren't enough movies and there's very little computer software on DVD today." Also at issue, warns Martin Levine, editor of the newsletter Digital Technology Report, are continuing disputes about the DVD standard, both in terms of media and recordable formats. "There are lingering animosities among the companies that designed the products," he told me. Most ominous is the " DVD killer" waiting in the wings. It's called Digital Video Express (Divx), and it's getting heavy support from Circuit City, the consumer-electronics store chain that's now expanding heavily in the Northeast. Essentially a disposable version of DVD , each $4.99 Divx disk comes with an encryption lock, which allows unlimited plays for 48 hours. Why pay the $20-and-up asking prices common for standard DVDs when there's a far cheaper alternative? Hey, I enjoyed seeing Kurt Russell in Breakdown-it was well worth the $2.50 it cost me to rent the VHS video-but I don't want to own a copy of the flick. From Hollywood's perspective, greed is the force driving DVD . Why sell a few thousand copies of a tape to video stores, which consumers then rent at $2.50 a pop (with no added revenue to the studio), if you can extract 10 times that amount from all comers? For consumers, movies on DVD are a delight to watch, so cost will be at the root of whether the technology becomes a winner. Right now, as Levine noted, "There's still no sense of whether DVD , on the movie-player side, is going to be a hit, a flop or something in between." On the computer side of the equation, there's no disputing that DVD fills a need. Thanks to its massive data-storage capacity, the disks will become the standard means of distributing the bloatware spewed forth by Microsoft and its competitors. But what computer users really want isn't DVD -ROM; it's recordable DVD . Here, Hitachi has taken the lead, shipping the first rewritable DVD -RAM drives, which hold 2.6 Gbytes of data. Unfortunately, Philips and Sony are going off on their own with a competing recordable format. The fracture threatens to slow deployment, raising the spectre that DVD -RAM could face the same stumbling rollout as DVD -ROM. Here's hoping that the DVD leaders have learned something from Sony's Betamax debacle. Because if they don't iron out their differences, Christmastime will be pretty bleak next year. -Alexander Wolfe is managing editor, computers and communications, for EE Times.