New Variety Blu-ray Disc From Pioneer

New Variety Blu-ray Disc From Pioneer

Thought the 25GB capacity of the traditional Blu-ray disc was large?  Wait until yo u see this.  Pioneer Electronics, a member of the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) did a bit of work on their own and were able to produce a 16-layer Blu-ray disc.  This new multi-layered optical disc can hold the traditional 25GB of a Blu-ray disc per layer, giving a total capacity of a whopping 400GB.

The breakthrough was made in the material of the reflective layers.  The pick up head remains the same as current Blu-ray discs and thus these new multi-layered discs will be compatible with current players.  This is certainly good news for the consumer, as it means that there will be no need for a new expensive player to hit the market.

Pioneer is hard at work to continue developing their super multi-layer technology, with a 20-layer, 500GB disc is already in the works.  Pioneer expects the discs to remain read-only until 2010, at which rewritable discs will be added to the lineup.  They forecast that they will be able to hit the 1TB mark by 2013.

With optical discs now reaching sizes in the hundreds of gigabytes, what’s next for hard drives?

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