Attack of the Blue Lasers

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With their neon glow, pneumatic whoosh and blastastic destructive force, lasers are the preferred weapons for sci-fi movie heroes when the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance. But here on Earth, lasers—which in more humble household varieties nestle deep inside your DVD player, reading data from the discs—are at the center of an epic movie battle of another kind: an escalating showdown among Japan's giant electronics manufacturers over the next generation of DVD technology. This fight may not decide the future of humankind, but the stakes are plenty high. The winners may be able to chart the course of the video industry for years to come, dictating the type of technology that goes inside your next home entertainment system while reaping billions of dollars in licensing royalties.

You may not think there is anything wrong with current video discs. But electronics engineers are busily inventing new families of smarter, more computer-like media devices that will not just play movies but will also make it easier to record television shows and store music, digital-photo albums and home videos—and DVDs as we know them just aren't up to the task. Instead, high-volume discs that are the same size as DVDs yet can hold over five times more information are being developed.

Engineers, however, rarely agree on the best migration routes when it's time to move to a new technology. The industry has settled on this much: the hardware used in current DVD players, which emit red-laser beams to read data, should be replaced with gear that uses blue lasers. That's because a blue laser's narrower, more efficient beam enables far more information to be packed onto discs. Blue-laser DVDs promise sharper picture quality suitable for display on advanced flat-screen high-definition TVs and computer monitors. Previously, they were too expensive and unreliable to go in mass-market electronics, but a recent breakthrough in the materials that make up blue-laser diodes (the light-emitting component) has made them commercially viable.

But in a dustup that harks back to the VHS-vs.-Betamax standards showdown at the dawn of the VCR era, the industry has splintered into two warring camps over how best to implement blue-laser technology. Spearheading one group is Sony, which promotes a technology it calls Blu-ray. Sony senior vice president Kiyoshi Nishitani, a battle-tested engineer who heads up the Blu-ray initiative, says his company began work on the new technology four years ago and quickly enlisted Matsushita (best known for its Panasonic brand), Philips and Pioneer, among others, as allies in its cause. All was going well, he claims, until Toshiba decided to ruin the party. "We have had many, many meetings with Toshiba," Nishitani says. But when it came to explaining the benefits of joining the alliance to his counterparts at Toshiba, he adds with a shake of his head, "we could not get them to understand."

Toshiba's DVD executives, led by an equally legendary veteran, senior vice president Hisashi Yamada, cheerfully admit that they spurned the Blu-ray consortium's advances and decided to develop their own HD-DVD technology instead. The proud victor over Sony in setting the standards of the first generation of DVDs in the 1990s, Toshiba is unwilling to meekly follow the competition. Yamada seems to delight in playing spoiler in the face of what many at Toshiba perceive as Sony's arrogance. "The way of Sony is very simple," says Yamada. "'Our format is best,' they say. 'You should adopt it,' they say. Only that. No compromise." But, he adds with a mischievous grin, "We do not think Sony's is the right technology at the right time. We think ours is better."