James Delahunty
21 Sep 2004 14:52
Next month, Sony is expected to announce the development of an 8 layer blu-ray disc that is capable of holding up to 200GB. The company will make the announcement at the International Symposium on Optical Memory 2004. Sony also plans to commercialize a 4-layer 100GB version in 2007. "The advantage of Blu-ray over DVD is definitely capacity and we are extending our multilayer performance. The 8-layer is a technology demonstration. We haven't decided when we are going to commercialize it yet," said Sony spokesman Taro Takamine.
Blu-ray technology is currently battling with HD-DVD technology to replace conventional DVDs. Sony and Matsushita sell blu-ray players but they are still very expensive. A market will not develop for either technology until Hollywood studios can be sure that they can protect their content against piracy. Blu-ray Disc backers announced that they added the MPEG4 and VC1 video codecs at the beginning of September. This will allow much better quality video under heavy compression. Sony also announced earlier this year that blu ray discs will be used with its upcoming Playstation 3, which is expected to reach the market in 2006.
Source:
Digit Online