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The smart money will wait out the standards war before buying a high-definition DVD player.
If you were lucky enough to get a fancy HDTV set, you're probably eager for a high-definition DVD player to go with it.
But remember the Betamax! Consumer electronics is an industry notorious for rapid change and 2006 is already shaping up as a particularly disruptive year. Some of the changes will be incremental -- new phone features, lower prices for TVs -- but a standards war in DVD players and recorders has the potential to render some of the first players obsolete.
Today's DVD players and recorders are based on red lasers, which read and write millions of little digital data pits on those shiny DVD discs. But the sun is setting on red-laser DVDs, because the relatively long wavelength of the red laser limits the capacity of a standard-size DVD disc, just as the world is making the transition to high-definition movies and television.
Blue lasers have a shorter wavelength, and thus can read and write much more data on the same-size DVD disc -- nearly 50 gigabytes on one type of double-layer blue-laser disc, more than enough for playing back a high-def movie or recording two or more hours of a high-def TV show.
The smart money will wait out the standards war before buying a high-definition DVD player.
If you were lucky enough to get a fancy HDTV set, you're probably eager for a high-definition DVD player to go with it.
But remember the Betamax! Consumer electronics is an industry notorious for rapid change and 2006 is already shaping up as a particularly disruptive year. Some of the changes will be incremental -- new phone features, lower prices for TVs -- but a standards war in DVD players and recorders has the potential to render some of the first players obsolete.
Today's DVD players and recorders are based on red lasers, which read and write millions of little digital data pits on those shiny DVD discs. But the sun is setting on red-laser DVDs, because the relatively long wavelength of the red laser limits the capacity of a standard-size DVD disc, just as the world is making the transition to high-definition movies and television.
Blue lasers have a shorter wavelength, and thus can read and write much more data on the same-size DVD disc -- nearly 50 gigabytes on one type of double-layer blue-laser disc, more than enough for playing back a high-def movie or recording two or more hours of a high-def TV show.
Don't be a casualty of the standards war
