Avec le report de la PlayStation 3, le Blu-Ray perd un point

La PlayStation 3 de Sony ne sortira pas comme prévu le 17 novembre en France. Le japonais Sony a annoncé que le lancement de la nouvelle génération de sa console vedette était repoussé pour l'Europe, la Russie et l'ensemble des territoires PAL. Seuls le Japon, les Etats-Unis et le Canada seront livrés dans les temps. Des retards de production dans le laser bleu du lecteur Blu-Ray ont été officiellement mis en cause par Sony. Plus qu'un raté pour les fêtes de Noël, c'est aussi et peut-être surtout un grand coup dur pour Sony qui comptait sur la PS3 pour imposer le Blu-Ray face au HD DVD.

HEXUS.lifestyle: But in just raw data storage, Blu-ray is going to be better as it holds more data.

Jim Armour: Looking at the numbers on a bit of paper, you’d think so, but what you need to do is look at the Blu-ray disks and players first, before you make a decision. Let’s go back to the disk construction for a second. HD-DVD uses a sandwich method which helps to combat disk warping. Blu-ray doesn’t. They use a single plastic substrate layer, then add on the recording material and the top it all off with a very hard Zircon layer. This means that when the disk expands to get hot, it will warp downwards as that Zircon layer isn’t going to budge.

HEXUS.lifestyle: But that’s a uniform direction of warping? Surely as long as you’re ready for it, it won’t make any difference?

Jim Armour: You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But now we have to go back to the lens. Blu-ray uses a 0.85 Numerical Aperture and, with their recording layer just 0.1mm below the disk surface, they’ve got to get the lens very close to the disk surface to be able to focus it tightly enough to give them a 25Gb storage capacity. So now you’ve got a Blu-ray lens sitting somewhere between 0.1 and 0.3 millimetres from a disk coated with a substance almost as tough as diamond which, when it warps, can only warp downwards, towards the lens. Guess what happens when you run Zircon over glass at 2000 RPM? Sure, your data will be safe but you’re going to need a new Blu-ray lens.