Ricoh Announces four-way Optical Device

In what I can only term as inevitable, Arstechnica has reported that Ricoh has developed a new optical lens capable of reading and writing several formats, including HD DVD, Blu-ray, CD, and DVD. This is a major step up towards the unified drives which everyone has been expecting. “For various optical disk formats, the data layer is positioned at different distances from the surface of the compact disk, a factor that contributes to the difficulty of supporting multiple formats in a single drive. Ricoh’s new optical drives use a special diffraction grating that can adjust the laser so that it can target the correct depth for each format." According to a Ricoh representative, this is the first drive that can handle all four major formats. Let’s see how much time it takes for the first drives to make their appearance.