At the 70th Autumn Meeting of the Japan Society of Applied Physics being held this week, Sharp announced that they have successfully created a Blu-ray laser diode which operates at a maximum of 500mW, enough to burn four-layer Blu-ray discs. This would allow for, when approved by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), Blu-ray discs with either 75GB or 100GB capacities.
Sharp was able to advance Blu-ray laser diode technology by using a new method to process the edge face of the resonator. Typically, the crystal in the semiconductor is protected by a dielectric film. The consumer electronics company found that by introducing an aluminum oxynitride divider, performance of the diode increased exponentially.
They have performed many test on the diode, operating it more than 1000 hours straight at a temperature of 80 degrees Celsius (176 degrees Fahrenheit) at full power, and have determined it ready for mass production.
The only hurdle now is the BDA will have to adopt the BD-75 and BD-100 into the Blu-ray format, but once that happens, Sharp hopes to have commercially ready products soon after.
Maybe THIS is why Warner is waiting to release LOTR EE's. :P Can you say entire trilogy on maybe two discs? Eventually, you won't need to be really well versed on encoding. Just max out the bitrate on everything and you'll be good to go.
I recall reading previously that all these 50GB+ prototype discs made by various manufacturers were being made to work in our existing systems. I hope that is still the case...
Those LOTR BDs are probably already manufactured and sitting in that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark just waiting to be released at teh opportune time.
The article is somewhat vague. It starts off talking about BURNING three and four layer disks, but the latter part of the article does not talk about BD-r disks. The only real-world application for this technology would be for data storage. Unless BD-75 and BD-100 disks can be made compatible with current players, the technology will never be popular for consumer video. Possibly this technology could be used for 3-D if a way could be found to store a standard 2-D version on two layers readable by current players.
I disagree. Future Blu-ray disks could possibly be burned onto BD-75 and BD-100 and these drives would be backwards compatible with current day Blu-ray movie disks. Current day technology will always become obsolete. What is the shelf life of a Blu-ray player? People may own it for a few years and their next one will be capable of reading BD-75 and BD-100.
As many have pointed out, this would, at least initially, be for data storage (BD-R/RE) discs. Now, if they were successful enough, there is no reason why they couldn't transition over to Hollywood films. Remember, Blu-ray started as a data storage medium until Hollywood required a high definition optical format.
You know....I think these companies FIRST need to make their players work properly with all existing titles, instead of cramming a bunch of extra stuff (most people don't even watch) onto 75g, or 100g disca to freeze up our players. So don't be shocked when you need a NEWER player to play those!.......It's all marketing..........and these companies KNOW that they are good at it.
Great, now they are going to be throwing 30GB onto 100GB discs!!
There are way too many naive people posting here. Most discs use about 30GB so there's no need for 100GB discs. This would mostly be for people using Blurays for backups.
Mike2060 - That is not true. more capacity will be useful, it means blu ray has a chance to stay around for years to come. HDMI 1.4 is going to support 4k lines of resolution, so if blu ray is able to support up to 100gb or even 400gb like Pioneer announced, then this should be enough capacity to support 4k and eventually 6k resolution. It would obviously mean new 4k or 6k hdtvs and new blu ray players with a new blu ray amp to support HDMI 1.4 as they are changing the cables.
But this would prolong blu ray life as a format and there may not be any need for holographic disc technology.
But 4k resolution televisions and projectors (that aren't $50k) are a long way out so 100GB now or in 5-10 years doesn't make much difference. And 50" 4k televisions are pretty much useless so 4k is only useful for people with projectors (that can be argued as well)
They don't really make any mention of whether these discs will play on existing players, however I've read that Hitachi players and the PS3 would simply require a firmware update to read the four-layer discs. I'm sure many other players could do the same.
At the 70th Autumn Meeting of the Japan Society of Applied Physics being held this week, Sharp announced that they have successfully created a Blu-ray laser diode which operates at a maximum of 500mW, enough to burn four-layer Blu-ray discs. This would allow for, when approved by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), Blu-ray discs with either 75GB or 100GB capacities.
