CD/DVD/HD-DVD compatible player drive

NEC has developed an optical disc drive (prototype) that supports the new HD-DVD format and is also compatible with CD and DVD formats.
NEC engineers had to overcome several challenges, one of them being to develop a multi wavelength laser to be compatible with 3 different ones: 780 nm for CD, 650 nm for DVD and 405nm for HD-DVD. Last but not least, everything had to fit in a 5"1/4 enclosure. How was it possible? thanks to a single chip which integrates support for the different formats
Production should start in April 2005, and shout hit the market in September 2005. Knowing that Pioneer is buying controller chips from NEC, we should see similar product coming at the same time.