Thursday, August 31, 2006

Obligatory Sony Post

This is starting to get overly technical, but you'll get the gist:
Optical drive manufacturers have indicated that yield rates for blue laser diodes have been much behind demand. This shortage has forced Sony to suspend its blue laser shipments so that they can be used in the supposed 4 million PS3s being produced this year. . . .

Apparently the manufacturers of blue laser diodes, which are needed for both the Blu-ray and HD DVD optical drives, have not had much success in improving their yield rates. . . .

This puts Sony in particular in quite a bind. Sony has obviously invested quite a bit in the Blu-ray format and the company would very much like consumers to pick up a Blu-ray player and not an HD DVD player or the HD DVD peripheral for Microsoft's Xbox 360. In order to make sure that the Blu-ray enabled PlayStation 3 does not run into any further problems, Sony has actually suspended shipments of blue laser diodes to other customers so that the components can be used for PS3 manufacturing first.

I'm sure that last part is going to go over well.

No comments: