Blu becomes red: Sony's red laser Blu-ray DVD player

In case you hadn't noticed (and we wouldn't be offended if you hadn't), there's a format war going on over whose high-capacity disc is going to succeed the DVD. We won't bore you with the details this time around (we know we certainly have at least once before), but one of the biggest complaints about the blue laser Blu-ray disc format that Sony has been pushing is that it isn't backwards compatible, and that its players won't be able to read regular DVDs or CDs (which require a red laser — it has something to do with the wavelength of light of each laser). Now they're saying that they've figured out how to get a red laser Blu-ray player (which is sort of a contradiction) to play Blu-ray DVDs,
regular DVDs, and CDs. It's still gonna be a couple of years before you can buy one.