Features - Storage Innovations:

NEC DEVELOPS COMBO DRIVE FOR NEXT-GENERATION, CURRENT DVDs

Japanese electronics conglomerate NEC Corp said it has developed an optical disc drive capable of playing back and recording both next-generation and existing DVDs.

The recorder comes with the world's first single optical head that combines both a red laser -- which reads and writes the current generation of DVDs -- and a blue laser, which does so for next-generation discs.

NEC said it expects to launch a commercial product sometime in 2005, but that the timing of its rollout would depend on the amount of next-generation DVD content available at the time. The first products will likely be used in PCs, NEC said.

Earlier this year, Sony Corp began sales of the world's first high-definition video DVD recorder that uses blue-laser technology.

The proliferation of high-definition television is expected to spur demand for video recorders using blue lasers, since recording capacity of next-generation DVDs is almost four times that of existing discs. Sony is part of a consortium that includes some of the world's biggest consumer electronics makers, such as Philips and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd, maker of the Panasonic brand, to back a technology called Blu-ray.

NEC and Toshiba, on the other hand, support a rival standard called HD-DVD, which last month won the backing of the DVD Forum, an industry association of some 220 electronics and media companies.

By combining two lasers into a single optical head, NEC said its new disc drives would be smaller and thinner than other drives that use two optical heads. The drive is powered by a system chip developed by NEC's semiconductor unit, NEC Electronics Corp.

Shares of NEC closed down 2.68 percent, versus a 0.73 percent decline on Tokyo's electric machinery sub-index.