Honey, Sony Shrunk The Blu-Ray Laser

Check out this 3mm thick Blu-Ray laser that Sony and Nichia came up with. Not only will it allow for smaller, more compact drives, but its also expected to help in the effort to drive Blu-Ray players and burner prices down. Maybe they'll even get down to HD-DVD player prices so we can all find out which one really is more popular.

Other nifty features include the ability to read dual layer Blu-Ray discs and the ability to read disks with organic dyes in their recording layers. Who cares about organic dyes, am I right? Wrong, organic dyes allow Blu-Ray discs to be manufactured from existing DVD manufacturing lines, so the ability to read from such disks could be what finally drives the prices of Blu-Ray discs down.

Sony is hoping to start placing these lasers in Blu-Ray burners and readers for notebooks which have a 9.5mm drive bay. Like I said, these lasers are supposed to be cheaper so hopefully we can see the production costs of these devices start coming down and consequently the sale price.

[via tech.co.uk]