A MANUFACTURING process that could slash the price of blue lasers almost a thousandfold has been developed by Japanese electronics company Sharp. The development should kick-start the manufacture of affordable players for a new generation of high-capacity DVDs.
The new discs will hold five times as much video data as today’s DVDs. But the players that will be needed to read them will have to use blue laser diodes, which until now have cost around $1000 each because they can only be made in an expensive batch process. But engineers at Sharp’s UK lab in Oxford revealed last week that…
