Here at Display Daily we extensively cover - some might say obsess about - the HD-DVD/Blu-ray Format War. If that war hasn’t exactly immobilized the next-gen DVD industry, it’s certainly giving early adopters a good reason to adopt less early.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of HDTV Retailer and
Mobile Display Report

One way around this counterproductive format war would be making a disk drive that reads both formats: Buy one drive; read any disk. But beyond the licensing issues that could make this solution unnecessarily difficult and expensive, there is a specific technical issue. The two formats place the readable layer at different distances from the optical read head. The Blu-ray data layer is 0.1mm below the disk’s surface, while the HD-DVD data layer is 0.6mm down. (A traditional DVD also has its data layer 0.6mm down, while a CD’s data layer is 1.1mm under the disk’s surface.)

Now, Ricoh says it has developed an optical component that permits the reading and writing all DVD and CD disk formats with just one pickup and one objective lens. The company will show the component at the International Optoelectronics Exhibition ‘06 outside Tokyo on July 12-14, and intends to offer the device to OEMs by year’s end. According to an EE Times story that appeared today, "The component is a 3.5-mm diameter, 1-mm thick round diffraction plate with minute concentric groves on both sides which function as a diffraction grating. The diffraction plate is placed between lasers and an objective lens."

A multi-format player can identify the format of the disk that’s been loaded. Armed with that information, the read sub-system can cause the optical diffraction component to introduce the diffraction grating appropriate for the format, which enables the objective lens to focus the beam to the right depth.

To many people, Ricoh may seem an unlikely participant in the format wars. But although the company is best known for its business-oriented copiers and office-automation equipment, it is a significant purveyor of DVD and CD media. In 2001, it arranged with Funai Electric to jointly develop and produce CD-RW and DVD+RW drives, but left the business in 2004 as plummeting prices and increasing competition made profits hard to find.

But Ricoh never stopped developing unique media and systems. In late 2005 the company announced the development of an eight-layer optical disk that could expand the storage capacity of a Blu-ray-type system to 200GB. That system incorporated a special plate for filtering out the light scattered from the layers between the laser and the data layer of interest. Presumably, it also incorporated a mechanism for adjusting focus. At that time it was noted the eight-layer technology employed an optical head that shared the same basic design of Blu-ray and HD-DVD optical heads, so the technology could be used for either of these standards. It would seem to be only a few logical steps from this eight-level system to Ricoh’s current announcement.

So, Ricoh is offering to cut the Gordian Knot of the Format War. When Alexander, according to myth, cut the original Gordian Knot, it was to create exposed ends that could be used to further unravel the knot. Let’s see if any makers of optical disk drives are inclined to seize the ends Ricoh is promising to expose.