New bluray diodes avail soon

[qumefox]

My $.02.... Judging by past experience, it was a typo. My guess they left off a few zeros and it should have been 100000, and not 1000... $1200 or so is a lot more in line with what samples usually go for after all.

Though, and this is an OT rant here...

Despite the many people that whine about high prices for high power lasers or their components... cheap diodes will be the death of this hobby.


Here's a good analogy. Imagine what the vehicle accident rate would be if Lamborghini Gallardo's were say.. $3,000 and made by the millions... Now imagine how many more laws and how much more strict and prevalent enforcement of those laws would be...

There are a lot of stupid people out there in the world. Stupid people that WILL do (and already are doing) stupid things with cheap high power lasers. And the more prevalent random acts of stupidity with lasers becomes, the faster the hammer will fall.. so to speak.

At least when they were expensive, only rich idiots could do stupid things with them, and there's usually not many rich idiots.

 

[Toaster]

My pet peeve is with the Gallardo. It's Guy-ardo not Gall-ardo.. Nothing against you, just saying kinda like Boo-gotti not Bue-gotti

But for Queme, I feel you man. As soon as we find a way to weed out all idiots, we should be good.

 

[Trevor]

Bobhaha, Sorry to be a dick but your sigs kinda fat.

Sure, the lower half of bobhaha's posts can get annoying, but the top half of yours are always annoying.

On topic: I'm excited to get one of these on my testing rig...

-Trevor

 

[SpyderFire]

Sorry, I forgot about you. You are the most likeable person here. I like how you don't try to start pissing matches with everyone.

Whereas Exerd here has to be a smartass about it. Look, if they are advertising that price, call them up on it and see what the deal is. Neither of you should be arguing until we know that the conditions are.

Either one of you could be wrong.

My pet peeve is with the Gallardo. It's Guy-ardo not Gall-ardo.. Nothing against you, just saying kinda like Boo-gotti not Bue-gotti

But for Queme, I feel you man. As soon as we find a way to weed out all idiots, we should be good.

Hey Toaster please find another thread to screw up please.

 

[Toaster]

Can't see what I did wrong in either of the posts. But if you don't want me to post, that's cool.

Just tryin' to help.

See you guys around

 

[Spengo]

No need for drama guys... Perhaps there should be a forum option so you don't have to see sigs. I'd like that too honestly. Maybe someone should make another thread here about it so it doesn't clog up this thread.

I called the Sony U.S. Sales number and selected the "Blu-Ray" department (for lack of a better option ). I ended up having a very nice time explaining and discussing this diode with the sales rep, and he seemed quite fascinated by the idea of making custom lasers out of such diodes, as we hobbyists do. I didn't quite get anywhere in terms of actually purchasing one of them, but it was worth a try and ended up in an interesting conversation.

Anybody else have any luck with this? I'm thinking the next step is calling Sony Japan. Oh and btw $11.92 should be accurate because that's how much 1000¥ amounts to. Do note that they would probably only accept orders at these prices in massive quantities, however.

-Chris

What about a group buy? Call back and see how much they would charge per diode for an order of something like 100 diodes. It may not be as low as the $11.92 price you'd get for ordering thousands but I bet it's WAY cheaper than buying a new blu ray drive and tearing it to pieces.

I'll take however many diodes $100 buys! :eg: Heck, even if that only gets you 1 diode it's a deal...

 

[qumefox]

100 units is still just a drop in the bucket of what it would take to get any real price breaks when talking about manufacturing sales of hundreds of thousands to millions of units. Though if they were interested in selling them, and they were reasonably priced, some would have turned up for sale by now.

 

[Spengo]

Never hurts to ask.

 

[cmak]

Cmak, you have a hard time grasping the reality of many things. Just because a quote was found saying these are $12 does not mean you will ever have the opportunity of paying $12 for one. I find it funny to note that I have not seen this forum get a hold of such diodes at low prices ever. It has always been, buy the electronic it arrives in, disassemble, and then extract the diode. That drive for these new does was just stated to cost close to $400.

Work with the logic that history has demonstrated in the past, not with the thought of how you wish it could occur.

Got beef?

Read my other posts in this thread real quick. I don't doubt that the sample price was off by a zero (or two), and none of what you stated in your (above-quoted) reply comes to me as news, nor as information that I didn't already know. Nonetheless, thanks for your input.

-Chris

 

[Benm]

The sample price may be way off, but eventually its going to be in a consumer product, and i can't imagine it would remain crazily expensive at that point. I doubt any consumer would pay more than say $300 for the entire drive, but it remains to be seen how much of that goes towards the laser diode.

I wonder who buys these things in the first place though... with 50 GB disks prices at well over $10, what is the point? For a terabyte of storage you'd pay in the order of $400 for the drive and discs... and a terabyte harddisk costs only $60-70 or so - cheaper than the bluray media even if you don't count the drive.

 

[Spengo]

The sample price may be way off, but eventually its going to be in a consumer product, and i can't imagine it would remain crazily expensive at that point. I doubt any consumer would pay more than say $300 for the entire drive, but it remains to be seen how much of that goes towards the laser diode.

I wonder who buys these things in the first place though... with 50 GB disks prices at well over $10, what is the point? For a terabyte of storage you'd pay in the order of $400 for the drive and discs... and a terabyte harddisk costs only $60-70 or so - cheaper than the bluray media even if you don't count the drive.

Well, hard drives are pretty fragile, perhaps they are looking for some more permanent data storage. I suppose you could just buy three 1TB drives and set up a RAID-5 array though...

Oh well, I remember when CD burners were horrifically expensive (and took over an hour to write 1 freakin CD) and now you can buy a stack of 100 DVDs and a burner for like $15-20 each. Give it another 2-3 years and blu-ray drives will come standard on most computers.

 

[Benm]

I don't know about fragile though... i've always felt that optical disks are more fragile than harddrives (scratches etc). Back in the day when cd-writers became more common, a cd could hold a sizeable amount of data compared to the harddisk. I think i had a 2GB harddrive that could be backed up onto 4 discs at the time. I paid in the order of $150 for the cd burner, and the discs weren't that expensive anymore ($1 or less).

Nowadays its quite a bit different: to back up my 500 GB notebook drive it would take an entire spindle of DVDs or 20 bluray discs. It seems to be an ongoing trend though, harddisks just grow faster than optical storage.

Lets hope there will be breaktroughs in the field, perhaps holographic media or something like that.... and hope they use bigass lasers

 

[Cenobite9]

I guess for archival backups in small shops this would be fine as magnetic tape has a tendancy to degrade over time. Hopefully we will see consumer products with these new diodes soon.

 

[Exerd]

A disc can be relied on. While a hard drive can fail, a disc kept in a case is almost certainly going to reliably hold its data forever.

Blu ray is the simple evolution of the disc, nothing more, nothing less. We use CDs and DVDs, and they aren't always big enough. Many programs and games are requiring multiple Dvds to hold their data. Those things are going to become ever increasingly larger in file size as time moves forward. The blu ray is the simple progression towards space minimization. SD cards became micro SD cards, thumb drives have grown in storage size exponentially, and now discs are too. Non of it is cheap in the beginning, but as time goes on, people find these things more commonly in their homes.

 

[hakzaw1]

Is th diode in these burners the 20X we heard was coming?