NEC has announced that it will launch the HR-1100A, described as the world’s first 5.25-inch PC drive for HD DVDs, in October. According to the company, the device is backward-compatible with DVDs and CDs and uses a laser head developed by NEC that can work with blue light as well as conventional red and ultraviolet light. The new HD DVD standard offers storage capacities of up to 64 GB—more than 13 times that of a standard DVD—and up to 16 hours of recording and playback in HD quality.
The drive reads HD DVD media at 2x speed. According to NEC, DVD-R and DVD+R media can be read at up to 8x DVD speed, as can rewritable and dual-layer DVDs. DVD-RAM media is read at 5x speed. As a CD-ROM drive, the HD DVD multireader reaches 32x CD speed. NEC has not yet announced a price for the drive.
HD DVD is comparable to DVD but uses blue rather than red laser light. Blue laser light has a significantly shorter wavelength and can therefore be focused more precisely with optical lenses, allowing information to be written at a much higher density. As a result, considerably more data fits on an HD DVD medium. An HD DVD-RW with 32 GB of capacity (single-sided, dual-layer) or 64 GB (double-sided, dual-layer) is intended to represent the maximum; these formats are currently still under development.
