Reader Phil Julian asks: Over many years, I've been an early adopter of all kinds of tech, and now that I'm older and maybe a bit wiser I want to quit buying the same video over and over again. I've had it all, videodiscs, VHS, laserdisc, DVD... and now they want me to buy HD DVD or Blu-ray, geez! My question is, will the HD formats coming out now be it for the forseeable future, or is there something bigger and better on thehorizon? Well, Phil, there's always something bigger and better on the horizon, you know. Now that video formats are really just part of the computer storage industry, there's really no end in sight when it comes to this business. Magnetic storage follows Moore's Law closely, with capacity doubling every 18 months or so. Optical formats are a little more erratic due to compatibility issues, but you can be sure that blue-laser DVD, the basis for both HD DVD and Blu-ray, is hardly the end of the line.
So what's next? Here's a look at some technologies we may or may not see down the road, turning our high-def boxes into obsolete junk.
Ultraviolet Laser - We started with red lasers (CD and DVD), went to blue (HD DVD and Blu-ray) and up next may be ultraviolet. Each progression represents a shorter-wavelength laser beam, which means data can be packed more tightly on a disc. Pioneer developed, in theory anyway, an ultraviolet technology that would put up to 500GB on a disc, but little has been said of this technology since 2004. Still, there's no reason it couldn't work as advertised. continue...
Source
So what's next? Here's a look at some technologies we may or may not see down the road, turning our high-def boxes into obsolete junk.
Ultraviolet Laser - We started with red lasers (CD and DVD), went to blue (HD DVD and Blu-ray) and up next may be ultraviolet. Each progression represents a shorter-wavelength laser beam, which means data can be packed more tightly on a disc. Pioneer developed, in theory anyway, an ultraviolet technology that would put up to 500GB on a disc, but little has been said of this technology since 2004. Still, there's no reason it couldn't work as advertised. continue...
Source
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