TDK: Ok, we're done with the 200GB recordable Blu-Ray

That was fast. It took 'em years to develop recordable DVDs, then another couple more for the dual layer variety, but now but a few weeks after TDK announced their hard workin' intentions to develop 8-layer 200GB recordable Blu-ray discs, they've got it bagged. Balls to the fact that we still don't have the players; the interesting thing about these discs, however, is that the data isn't stored on thin layers of dye, no no. Apparently when each layer of bismuth peroxide and germanium oxide is heated to 690K by laser, microscopic air bubbles form and create the bits we've come to know and obsess over. Oh sure, these discs are probably going to be horrendously expensive in the beginning, but isn't it nice to know we're already good to go on capacities large enough to archive years of home movies? [Warning: link is Japanese and requires subscription.]

[Via Newlaunches]

[EatingPie @ Apr 28th 2006 9:45AM]

Fast? Not really!

Blu-Ray was designed as (a) a recordable technology and (b) expandable from the beginning.

Afer all, the very first BD set-top-boxes functioned only as recoreders (like VHS, but... er... BD). DVD was a read only format from the get-go, and DVD+-R/RW were really just high end hacks to the format... hence them taking so long to hit.

-Pie

[Brandon @ Apr 28th 2006 9:48AM]

Now(in the future) you can literaly back up your computer to one DVD. but for alot of money....

[Nukes and Candy @ Apr 28th 2006 9:54AM]

Balls of steel. Pettal to the metal. Tic Tac Toe, Give a dog a bone. Stronger than superman, batman and spiderman put together [Peter, on family guy].

Ok, Is this real? The cost of these babies would definitely but a huge crater on your wallet. Blue Ray hasn�t yet to win the HD wars, and theses faithful buccos are already developing Its 200GB Blue Ray cousin on crack.

I feel like there�s more publicity stunt written in the forehead of these 200 Gibby mommas, than being the real thing. I'm getting kind of tired with this HD war anyway. Why can�t you people just get along?


Alexander Wunderlich

[erik @ Apr 28th 2006 9:55AM]

better have a steady hand while handling these blue ray and HD DVD disc. One drop on the floor and their goes your life story in photos.

[ty @ Apr 28th 2006 9:55AM]

These higher capacity discs are aimed at the PC/storage market. 50 gb dual layer BRs will be more than suitable for commercial HD movies and games (PS3) for the near future.

[Exbzurg @ Apr 28th 2006 9:57AM]

O rly?


yeah they are biund to be expensive, plus the cost of the drives and drives that can record on blu-ray.
hey what about the possiblilty of a blu-ray hdd?

[JSM @ Apr 28th 2006 9:59AM]

So, a 400 disk changer of these things sitting behind my couch would be 80 Terabytes of Data - that's a lot of movies.

[Jason @ Apr 28th 2006 10:05AM]

meh. For holographic disks 200GB is the starting point...

Good job to TDk though!

[Amidal @ Apr 28th 2006 10:36AM]

If successful, the company's R&D effort will yield a disc with four times the capacity of today's biggest BDs and double the size of protoype next-generation BD-Rs TDK has already demo'd.TDK showed off a 100GB BD prototype in May 2005. The 100GB disc contains four data-storage layers, is recordable and supports a write speed of up to 216Mbps, double that of 50GB BD-Rs.It's expected to come to market next year, though with 50GB BD-R and BD-RE discs not yet shipping - media makers are now starting to push out single-layer, 25GB product - how soon that will be is open to question. The launch timeframe of the 200GB disc - with eight layers, presumably - is even more uncertain. TDK simply said it was in the process of developing such a part, and didn't even hint when the prototype might appear, let alone commercially available product.

[reuben @ Apr 28th 2006 10:48AM]

Bad part about it is the first players probably won't be able to read these discs. Sooner or later you'd put video on these disc and want to watch it on a set-top box but I can bet the first boxes will on be able to read the 25 and 50 gb discs, watch and see.

[Alex @ Apr 28th 2006 10:48AM]

A single layer disc holds 25gb. How does a 6 layer disc hold 200? Or did you mean 8?

[zak @ Apr 28th 2006 10:53AM]

alex, youre thinking of HD DVD's that hold around 20-30GB

blue ray started out stating that normal discs would hold 40-80GB.

[bdkennedy1 @ Apr 28th 2006 11:01AM]

Who's the hottie holding up the disk?

[mazola @ Apr 28th 2006 11:09AM]

Q: if a link is Japanese and requires a subscription, does it really exist?

[Jordan @ Apr 28th 2006 11:15AM]

I'd hate to burn a coaster!

Money + time in burning a disc that large would not be fun to waste!

[EatingPie @ Apr 28th 2006 11:30AM]

Zak - Alex was correct.

The Single Layer Blu-Ray disc is 25GB. A Dual Layer is 50GB.

HD-DVD at Single Layer is only 15GB. The dual layer is 30GB (and that, apparently, is what at least some of the movies are shipping on now).

No where was there the mention of a 40 or 80GB disc in either the BD or HD-DVD camp.

-Pie

[Alex @ Apr 28th 2006 11:31AM]

zak, I think I'm right, go to that website below you will see that single layer is 25GB and dual layer is 50GB.

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060410005113&newsLang=en

[EatingPie @ Apr 28th 2006 11:31AM]

"4. better have a steady hand while handling these blue ray and HD DVD disc. One drop on the floor and their goes your life story in photos."

So do NOT develop high-capacity backup mediums is what you're saying??

-Pie

[dmek @ Apr 28th 2006 11:42AM]

Pie,

Actually what he is saying is that he has no clue what he is saying because this exists in some laboratory in a bunker 50 floors below sea level.

[Fred @ Apr 28th 2006 11:46AM]

This is a nice advance forward. And of course it will be expensive, of course burners will be expensive also! That�s a natural step in a generation change for writable mediums. But it shows a bright future ahead, when the price is at a competitive level. Keep up the good work TDK.

[Lionel @ Apr 28th 2006 1:14PM]

I wonder if they will be able to use this technology in Hard Drives.

[MrFloppy @ Apr 28th 2006 1:28PM]

"These higher capacity discs are aimed at the PC/storage market."
?aaa...wrong. Theres something called "___ The Complete ____ Season".

[EnricoFermi @ Apr 28th 2006 1:31PM]

"better have a steady hand while handling these blue ray and HD DVD disc. One drop on the floor and their goes your life story in photos."

Redundancy is key to that problem. Even for a CD, bits can be missing and then recreated from algorithms built into the format. The same concept is behind forms of RAID and you can thank deep space NASA communication in the 70's for the innovation. Depending on the level of backup, a third or more of the disk could be missing and any other regions of the disc could then recreate the damaged area. However, I am not sure the level of scratch protection going into the format. Perhaps the Blu-Ray site has that answer.

[Rob @ Apr 28th 2006 1:54PM]

As a paranoid back-up freak, I'm fully aroused just thinking of the day I can backup buckets of data to these discs!

[MuDoggy @ Apr 28th 2006 2:10PM]

Will this be compatible with current gen blu-ray players? (such as the PS3). See, when DVD first came out I believe it was called DVD1.0 and it was single layer, then only a few months went by and everyone had to get new players because of DVD2.0 which was double layer. Everything read double layer from that point out. Is this going to need a new player to play 200GB of movie data? (if out little Ulead companies decided to let us burn that much movie data)

Or are they trying to stick this to data only, movies will always be capped at 50GB?

[Tony Rayo @ Apr 28th 2006 2:31PM]

@24 - I don't remember the whole DVD 1/2 thing, but both next-gen camps seem to be pushing the fact of having firmware upgradable hardware as a standard. Assuming the laser can physically complete the task, I don't see why we wouldn't be seeing new firmwares out to support new media such as we do with standard PC CD/DVD burners. Also let's stop kidding outselves... 200GB discs will be used 95% of the time to store our massive j-pr0n collection... why is everyone looking at me like that, come on, I cannot be the only one =p. - Tony R.

[Hoffy @ Apr 28th 2006 2:42PM]

Am I the only one who thought that headline meant they were giving up on it?

I seriously didn't even realize it meant they had finalized the technology until I was nearly finished reading the article.

[enseigner @ Apr 28th 2006 3:52PM]

none of this matters... once Big Bill G throws his considerable girth around and tells every big business that Windows only supports HDDVD then Sony's Blu-Ra-Ra will fizzle... too bad, looks like the better product of the two...

[James @ Apr 28th 2006 4:45PM]

28, i doubt it.

[Kevin M. @ Apr 28th 2006 5:54PM]

"better have a steady hand while handling these blue ray and HD DVD disc. One drop on the floor and their goes your life story in photos."

All TDK media are hard-coated with Durabis, a polymer than can withstand being scratched by a SCREWDRIVER. ALL Blu-Ray Discs are hard coated (by requirement) but only some are Durabis coated, but as I said the TDK will have it for sure.

[falcom @ Apr 28th 2006 6:30PM]

"All TDK media are hard-coated with Durabis, a polymer than can withstand being scratched by a SCREWDRIVER. ALL Blu-Ray Discs are hard coated (by requirement) but only some are Durabis coated, but as I said the TDK will have it for sure."

Its not on all tdk media...at least not cd and dvd media, because can i scratch a tdk disk(or ANY disk for that matter) with my fingernail. Last time i checked, my fingernails are softer then steel.

[David @ Apr 28th 2006 6:56PM]

Alex: This disc contains six layers, not eight.

"Traditional" Blu-ray discs hold 25GB per layer. This new disc (to be pedantic, it isn't technically Blu-ray since it isn't part of the current spec; same goes for JVC's hybrid Blu-ray/DVD disc) holds 33GB on each layer; hence six layers for 200GB.

This bump in layer capacity makes me doubt that any announced Blu-ray player could play these 200GB discs. It's also using a substrate with different optical properties that existing players won't be tuned for.

[Edwin @ Apr 28th 2006 11:32PM]

what the hell is someone gonna do with 200gb disc. holy shit.

[eric @ Apr 29th 2006 9:40AM]

They've probably moved onto producing 1TB-BL discs now

[ranron @ Apr 29th 2006 4:05PM]

Right now there aren't even Blu-Ray drives, so technically HD-DVD is winning the format wars. When Blu-Ray comes out, initially, you won't be able to buy these 200GB disks. This might take a year or two before it is finalized and ready for production. By then, we would be running 50 Terabyte hard drives, games will take up 150GB and then these disks will come into play.

[Karl Viklund @ Apr 30th 2006 2:14PM]

The HD-War is over. Blu-Ray is the winner and have been that since a few months. HD-DVD got their players to the market first but that's not always the best. Of course, they will argue the opposite.

HD-DVD is less expensive but that's like the only good thing about HD-DVD. It's time that we breake from this old things and move on. Blu-Ray is the next step. A Blu-Ray disc can store like 25 GB at one side and HD-DVD only 15 GB. You have to make a dual-layer HD-DVD to store more data then you can on a singe layer Blu-Ray so I don't understand why people are so excited about HD-DVD in the US. Ok, I don't like sony either but that will not stop me from getting one of their Blu-Ray players. And why choose 15 GB and you can choose a disc that can store 25 GB on each layer? I don't realy see the reason for it. Soon 15 will be feel too small and we need to move on the another format. And to be honest, 15 GB already feels too little for me at least. When I finaly get my hands on a Blu-Ray burner I will be able to burn all my files on a few disks which will be wonderful.

So why choose 15 GB when you can choose 25 GB? I don't see the reason.

[Teph @ May 2nd 2006 3:46PM]

@Karl Viklund

While I don't want to fuel the flame wars... I will point out what many have already...

BetaMax was a FAR superior format than VHS (in fact, BetaMax is still used by many studios for commercials and such), but VHS won the war.
Sony squeezes their formats too tightly, and doesn't want to play nice with the other children.

The bottom line is, Sony isn't electronic's industries messiah anymore. The walkman was cool and all, but I feel they've had some fairly mediocre products the last 15 years. The data helps prove my statement, where they've lost their grip on the electronics industry to Samsung and Panasonic, etc.
They're big head has gotten the best of them in the past, and its very possible it will again.

I'm not one to complain. I think blue-ray is awesome. Its not without its faults, but its technologically speaking better than HD-DVD.

However, I don't want to support Sony in any more of their bull-shit industry squabbling. They need to play nice or get the fuck out. Play dirty with the ps3 or with their slave labor, but don't fuck with the public and be stubborn about your format. It hurts your company and the consumers.

Yeah, I might be biased... but Sony has fucked me too many times (without the common courtesy of a reach-around).

Fuck me one, same on you.
Fuck me twice, shame on me.

Fuck me for 15 years... get the fuck out.

[daniel @ Apr 16th 2007 12:18AM]

protein coated disks....

50 Terabytes

google it