dual lasers in DVD's, is it true?

[TasDavo2]

Guys, a friend was telling me that the more expensive DVD players have dual lasers, one for DVD/VCD playback and one for CD playback.
I own a Sony DVP-S535D player and had a look at the tech screen and found a page that told me that I had 200hrs of DVD playback and 120hrs for cd so that seems to give his statement some credit but does anyone know out there if this is correct or not for sure? Purely out of curiosity thats all.
Cheers
Davo

[ViperXT]

Yes, many dvd players have dual lasers. Not nescesarily higher end ones though. One laser is dedicated to DVD reading and the other to CD/CD-R/W. This is because it is difficult to design one laser to pick up the different wavelengths between CD-R and DVD. Most players that claim compatibility with CD-R/W have dual laser pickup. I'm not sure about the Sonys counter though, it could just be judging my format. For example when you play CD-Audio it adds to the CD counter and if you play DVD it adds to the DVD counter. One way to test it would be to see if a miniDVD works. If it and it adds to CD it means it has two lasers, if it adds to DVD it has only laser i believe. I think the Sony would only be one laser because most Sony's I've seen have poor CD-R compatibility.
Hope this helps you.

[EricB]

Just like when CD-R first came out, some CD players would play them and others wouldn't, the hardware needed to be adjusted to read the different physical format. So at this point, the dual-laser is certainly not a "high end function" but just a normal means of ensuring compatibility with a writable disks. Lots of beautiful, older, high end DVD players, can't play a VCD or SVCD at all!