GristyMcFisty used our news submit to tell us that NEC has developed a combination optical head with a red and blue laser. Supposedly, it can read and write to both single and dual layer disks.
|  Japanese electronics conglomerate NEC Corp. said on Thursday it had developed an optical disc drive capable of playing back and recording both next-generation and existing DVDs.The recorder comes with the world's first single optical head that combines both a red laser -- which reads and writes the current generation of DVDs -- and a blue laser, which does so for next-generation discs. NEC said it expects to launch a commercial product sometime in 2005, but that the timing of its rollout would depend on the amount of next-generation DVD content available at the time. The first products will likely be used in PCs, NEC said.
 By combining two lasers into a single optical head, NEC said its new disc drives would be smaller and thinner than other drives that use two optical heads. The drive is powered by a system chip developed by NEC"s semiconductor unit.
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According to the article , high-definition television will create a demand for video recorders using blue lasers. I guess they are right, as long as we are allowed to record the shows. So far that doesn't look too promising. We know that there is a broadcast flag in the works to protect HD content. However, we also know that there will be many other uses for such an increase in recording capacity.
Source: Yahoo News
