Pioneer proudly pitches 400GB Blu-ray optical disc
16-layer disc detailed
Pioneer has pressed what it claims is the world's first 16-layer optical disc. It's keeping mum about the medium's format, but it's telling that each data layer has the same capacity as a Blu-ray Disc.
With 16 layers and a per-layer capacity of 25GB, that's a staggering 400GB in total, plenty of room not only for all the episodes of a TV series, but all of its seasons too.
And the capacity's twice the 200GB disc TDK was touting a couple of years ago as one possible future for Blu-ray.
Pioneer's 16-layer BD: capacious
There's a catch: right now, the technology's read-only, so it's clearly destined for pre-recorded content.
However, Pioneer claimed it had licked the problem of interference from all the layers between the surface of the disc and the one the player's trying to read from. Pioneer said it applied an array of optical and signal processing techniques to create a "16-layer optical disc that can play back high-quality signals from every layer".
It's not just the layer data capacity that matches the Blu-ray spec - so do the optical specifications of the lens. The upshot, Pioneer said coyly, is that "it is possible to maintain compatibility between the new 16-layer optical disc and the BD discs".
And not only is the disc Blu, it's green too: "The 16-layer optical disc technology, capable of storing much more data than the conventional discs on one disc, will greatly reduce the number of discs to be used and therefore contribute to the conservation of resources," Pioneer chirped.
COMMENTS
Cheap storage medium for 10KB Word files?
No dirt cheap medium? Here in the states I can run down to the Staples across the street and buy a 1GB USB stick for $5 or less (£2.53, according to Google). Are you telling me you guys in the UK can't do the same?
Paris, 'cause both she and I really don't know about the pricing of flash memory internationally.
@Highlander and the 10k Word Document
I think there is still a place for a medium to put a Word document on. Floppies which were 1.44MB now look small in capacity and cluncky. However CDs are too physically large and are also easy to damage.
The USB stick although universal are a bit costly. What we lack is a small cheap flash universal flash storage. We have dozens of candidates, all those camera memory cards. It would be nice to have a memory card that cost 25p that could hold say 32MB. But oh no, everything has to cost £15 and to keep the price there they just keep increasing the capacity.
So we will be recieving 10k word documents on 400GB disks just as we today recieve 10k word documents on 700MB CDs
@Jez Caudle
An empty(!) word file is already 24,576 bytes, so that 10KB must have been quite some time ago.
Now if you're talking about files created by OO...
Green?
I know for a fact that there are terrible people in this world who, since the demise of the floppy, and in the absense of any other suitable medium, have happily burned a few hundred KB onto a blank DVD, and not worried about it at all.
I really can't see this changing, although if I personally saw someone throw away 399.9999GB of spare capacity like that I'd have to bitchslap them immediately. Saddest thing is maybe I wouldn't... I'd get used to it like everyone else eventually.
My point is... the whole green credential thing is a bit meaningless when it's only as good as the end user who is often as ignorant as many other end users on such matters. Why even mention it?
The technology is great though! I remember my first 1GB HDD and wondering how the hell I was ever going to fill it... this in the early 90's!
Mine's the one with 16 layers ;)
What's the point?
For consumer playable multimedia, I don't see much point in this. Frankly, I think DVD is good enough for most people. Hell, VHS was good for a generation, and people stayed away from the superior Laserdisc technology in droves. (And SVHS, for that matter.)
High-capacity discs are nice and all, but as several people pointed out, as long as they're vulnerable to physical damage you're just putting more and more data in danger at once.
And while it's got a great WOW factor, cranking up the resolution on crappy movies and TV shows just means you see how crappy they are that much better. Even good movies that weren't made to be seen that closely are going to show their blemishes more clearly.
Shouldn't they be working on improving the content first, then worrying about getting a wall-sized TV into everybody's home to watch it?
As a read-write medium this is useful. As a read-only medium? Yawn. So you can pack the entire LOTR trilogy on one disc, with all the extras, at super-high resolution. So what? That just means more menus to go through when you insert it.
And more advertisements. Yay! Every time I insert a tape or disc now I get 10 minutes of ads I have to bypass, plus 2 minutes of FBI warnings in 13 different languages, plus another warning, plus three logos with fanfares. And then another ad, like as not. I rip DVDs as soon as I buy them and copy the main movie to a new DVD just so I don't have to go through that horsecrap over and over again.
16 layers means 16 times the room for advertisements and useless nonsense.
Not that I am bitter.
