Today we can report once more some interesting news around the "war" for the next generation optical formats. 8mh used our news submit to tell us that NEC, one of the main HD-DVD backing companies, has developed an optical drive that is capable to playback CDs, DVDs and the next generation HD-DVD format.

According to the article over at Yahoo News  the company had to solve some problems regarding the optical head and the chipset. Together with Sanyo Electronics, the company was finally able to produce an optical head which is able to handle all required wavelengths to playback the three formats (780nm for CD, 650nm for DVD, 405nm HD-DVD). NEC integrated also support for all three formats in one single chip which also includes a signal processing circuitry.

The prototype of the new drive is half height which means that the drive can be easily installed in drive bays of most desktop PCs.

Engineers from NEC have also indicated that the company plans to offer the new chip from April next year, the optical head will be sold by Sanyo. So we will probably see the drive around the stores in September 2005.

Wow, wow, wow! First the movie studios, then the hybrid disk and now the drive, meanwhile it seems that HD-DVD has really the better cards to become the dominating next generation optical disk format.

That it is much easier to make HD-DVD drives backward compatible then Blu-ray is a well known secret, but who thought that they will be so quick with the development of a drive that is also CD compatible.