Blu-Ray and HD DVD

The blue laser has a shorter wave than the red allowing for a far more precise reading, but as promising as it is blu-ray is not over the line yet...just because it's superior to the HD-DVD it also requires complete factory re-tooling whereas the (red) HD-DVD requires only partial re-tool (not the only reason), I read this format war was likley to be decided by Hollywood but last year Disney came out and will be backing Blu-Ray while Warner (?) or some other major studio(s) would be backing HD-DVD.
If anyone is interested to learn more or see a few players blu-ray.com has all the info you could want.

Actually, blu-ray was co-developed by the Blue Man Group and the Smurfs once in a blue moon ;^)

So does anyone know if will these new players play redbook CDs also?

Sgr

While current optical disc technologies such as DVD, DVD±R, DVD±RW, and DVD-RAM use a red laser to read and write data, the new format uses a blue-violet laser instead, hence the name Blu-ray. Despite the different type of lasers used, Blu-ray products can easily be made backwards compatible through the use of a BD/DVD/CD compatible optical pickup and allow playback of CDs and DVDs.

The benefit of using a blue-violet laser (405nm) is that it has a shorter wavelength than a red laser (650nm), which makes it possible to focus the laser spot with even greater precision. This allows data to be packed more tightly and stored in less space, so it's possible to fit more data on the disc even though it's the same size as a CD/DVD. This together with the change of numerical aperture to 0.85 is what enables Blu-ray Discs to hold 25GB/50GB.

(YES)

This is interesting stuff. After looking at the Blu-Ray and DVD sites, it does seem to be shaping up into another format war on the video side. I thought Blu-Ray was synonomous with HDDVD but it turns out HDDVD is a competing format from the dvd camp.The support of the computer industry will be critical and IBM is on the DVD side and Apple just signed on with Blu-Ray, though Blu-Ray also has HP and Dell and has greater storage capacity than HDDVD. Both sides have an impressive list of backers so it's going to take time to resolve. However, since they both use blue laser, I'm guessing that the difference will be in the disc rather than the player?