TDK reveals 6x BD-R disc

Even though the fastest Blu-ray burner you can buy today maxes out at just a 2x write speed, media manufacturer TDK is already looking towards a wonderful future filled with 4x and faster drives writing 200+GB of data to 8-layer discs. Now that they're gotten the capacity part down, the company is hard at work on discs that won't take five hours to burn, and the first fruit of this labor -- a 25GB platter rated at 6x -- was recently unveiled at Japan's Eighth Data Storage Expo -- although don't expect it to hit stores until next year. They were also showing off that 100GB quad-layer BD-R we heard about awhile back but never got the chance to peep, so make sure to follow the Read link to check out that plus many more exciting shots from what we hear was a pretty happening storage conference.

[Via HDBeat]

[jcj7161 @ Jul 2nd 2006 7:01PM]

Crikey---does anyone even care about blue ray or HD-DVD? Do we really need to follow the upgrade for no other reason than to make money for the tech sector? I am still using my 3 year P4 2.4 HT cpu with a DVD burner and it runs all the currents games and software without any problems. So waste your cash and upgrade upgrade upgrade!!!

[Crazylink @ Jul 2nd 2006 7:47PM]

I agree, hell I don't even have a DVD burner.(But I do need one...)

[pb @ Jul 2nd 2006 7:52PM]

jcj7161 : Why? Because people want more storage. I would LOVE to be able to buy a Blue Ray disc with multiple seasons of a TV show on it.

If you don't like the stories about future technology then I am not sure why you would read a blog like this.

[[e-mail] @ Jul 2nd 2006 8:08PM]

Have you given HD-DVD a good look?

It's still full of artifacting... we need a HD video format that DOESN'T go through the butcher-job compression that it currently does.

Technology brought us squeezed video... so that we COULD get video onto pc's and into living rooms... now that technology can handle the greater bandwidth, we should look seek to eliminate the high compression video.

[Eric @ Jul 2nd 2006 8:08PM]

I don't know why people keep going on and on about multiple seasons on a single disc. That shit just won't happen with the current discs, which only holds up to 9 hours of HD content (there won't be SD content on BRD), and there's no way that anyone would let a single-season disc go without artificially inflating the price back to the same as a multi-disc box set even if it WAS possible.

[James Farley @ Jul 2nd 2006 8:11PM]

Since 1X Blu-ray is 36Mbps/4MB/s, that means the 6X should be able to do 216Mbs/36MB/s. That's pretty damn fast.

For comparison 1X DVD is 11.08 Mbps, and 1X CD is 1.41Mbps. So this 6X Blu-ray should be a good bit faster than a 16X DVD. Can't wait till 16X Blu-ray comes out.

[Shadyman @ Jul 2nd 2006 8:11PM]

Agreed. They LIKE selling shows for a good 75 bucks a season. They wouldn't sell more on a disc if they could.

[Dp462090 @ Jul 2nd 2006 8:13PM]

"I would LOVE to be able to buy a Blue Ray disc with multiple seasons of a TV show on it."

No kidding, you could put full series' on a Blue Ray disc, over 20 full pc games atleast, hours & hours of music. That's worth the price, in my mind at least.

[Chris @ Jul 2nd 2006 9:11PM]

"I am still using my 3 year P4 2.4 HT cpu with a DVD burner and it runs all the currents games and software without any problems. So waste your cash and upgrade upgrade upgrade!!!"

What flawless logic. "My stuff works now, why should anything better come out?"

[iceatcs @ Jul 2nd 2006 9:23PM]

Crazylink @ 2.

But you will need one of those (HD-DVD or Blu-ray) in few years time.

[Reg @ Jul 2nd 2006 9:29PM]

It seems that Blu-ray will be great for data storage.

I'll certainly buy an OEM drive unit to install in my PC when they're available.

It would be ironic if Blu-ray failed as the next generation of video playback, but succeeded as the next generation storage format.

[iceatcs @ Jul 2nd 2006 9:29PM]

25GB or 50GB is dream to me cos I'm really sick of HD full very easy with all of these tv shows.

[eliot1785 @ Jul 2nd 2006 9:30PM]

"Crikey---does anyone even care about blue ray or HD-DVD? Do we really need to follow the upgrade for no other reason than to make money for the tech sector? I am still using my 3 year P4 2.4 HT cpu with a DVD burner and it runs all the currents games and software without any problems. So waste your cash and upgrade upgrade upgrade!!!"

If you're going to talk about games, CPU speed is not all that relevant. What is more relevant is GPU. Do you mean to say that you are also using a 3 year old GPU and it can play all current games, including say F.E.A.R.? At reasonably high graphics settings? Otherwise, if you've upgraded that more recently, your comment about the CPU is pretty irrelevant since GPU is the big bottleneck with games (of course both topics are irrelevant on a Blu-Ray thread...).

That said, overall I agree with you that the product replacement lifecycle for most applications is going down. Games are really the only exception. For word processing or internet browsing, or most "multimedia" tasks like videos and even photo editing, you can work on "obsolete" hardware. I have a 3 year old Dell laptop (Inspiron 8500) and it works fine for everything except games (it chokes completely on F.E.A.R. and does fairly poorly on Doom 3 as well).

So, your point is good minus the point about games. That said, just because upgrades are not a necessity the way they were in the 90's when computers were really crappy doesn't mean that they're not a good thing. I think it would be awesome to be able to put 200GB on a single disk. That would solve a lot of my problems. Then again, I don't even have a DVD burner, just a CD burner, so maybe a lot of my problems would be solved by that alone.

[John @ Jul 2nd 2006 9:53PM]

By the time BD is affordable I would've just finished moving all my stuff off CD to DVD.

[Brandon @ Jul 2nd 2006 10:31PM]

They've had these on the shelves at CompUSA for a week now.

[antaeus @ Jul 2nd 2006 11:00PM]

ah John you're a 60 year old looser that needs to keep up with times. I for one welcome out Blu-Ray burning OverLords,

[Michael @ Jul 2nd 2006 11:16PM]

---"I would LOVE to be able to buy a Blue Ray disc with multiple seasons of a TV show on it."---

No way man. Ever hear of putting all your eggs in one basket. Never a good idea. I'd hate to have even one entire season on one disk. Then if the disc gets scratched or lost or something I've lost the entire season. Multiple seasons on one disk would be even worse.
If I'm going to pay $40+ for a complete season of a TV show, give it to me on 4 or 5 disks. It will be safer and I'll feel like I'm getting more for my money. And while your at it, uncompress that video a little more for higher quality. :)

[risingsunofnihon @ Jul 2nd 2006 11:18PM]

Count me among the consumers who won't be spending any money to upgrade for this kind of storage. I guess I just don't care about being able to fit an entire season's worth of TV shows on a single disc. I seem to be getting by just fine with the equipment and capacity that I have now.

[Xero @ Jul 3rd 2006 12:20AM]

To everyone saying that you'd fit a lot on a Blu Ray disk, keep in mind that as the storage capacities increase, so will the content filling them up.

Higher quality and higher file sizes will quickly start to fill up even a 100GB Bluray Disc.

[Mark @ Jul 3rd 2006 12:48AM]

I was in Yokohama yesterday at a computer shop and I saw the Blu-Ray burners, readers, laptops with blu-ray drives, and the blu-ray discs themselves.. damn they were expensive! They had Panasonic BD-R 25GB discs for 1700 yen (15 bucks) and the 50GB BD-R's were ridiculous - 4200 yen (38 bucks). I think it's going to be a while before these things go mainstream, although in tech-crazy Japan, I saw that people were already buying them (laptops with blu-ray drives inside, I mean)

[eliot1785 @ Jul 3rd 2006 1:03AM]

"To everyone saying that you'd fit a lot on a Blu Ray disk, keep in mind that as the storage capacities increase, so will the content filling them up.

Higher quality and higher file sizes will quickly start to fill up even a 100GB Bluray Disc."

There are limits to this, though. You don't see MP3 files increasing in quality these days, despite the increase in available storage space. At a certain point, you reach a level of quality that most people consider to be high enough. Sure, people will take advantage of higher capacities, but they will get more benefit out of it than they did with lower-capacity disks.

[KawF @ Jul 3rd 2006 2:05AM]

As far as I know, the reason you don't get MP3's with larger filesizes these days is because there's a limit to what quality increase you get by upping the bitrate on the MP3 format.

You can however get losslessly encoded music with 7.2 channel audio or somesuch at the size of half a CD. Throw a full "theatrical" score of that onto the media, and you'll see that you might want media with larger capacity.

Never forget that for HD games, all the textures used will have to be made higher resolution in order to not render as crap. The latest 3d cards support textures of the size of something like 5000x5000pixel and up. Store that with lossless compression and with multiple levels of detail, again, huge.

Let's not forget about the world, architecture and ingame models, they are getting upped continously in "resolution" by adding more and more vertice data to them. Some techniques allow this to be constrained somewhat, and that works somewhat, but not fully. I was playing oblivion and walked up to a stone wall and looked at it from in front, looked beuatifull. When I got up close to it and looked at it sideways... where are the stones? It's just shadows on a flat model!

In order to support truly hi-def games, both in regards of graphics and audio, increased media size will be required.

I for one can't accept that by walking up to an ingame object, I see how "pixelated" the textures are. That what I thought was geometry was in fact just a trick of shadows. That the sound coming out of my surround sound system sounds like an old 1800's record.

I want next gen, not old gen spun as next gen and thrice as expensive.

[Jerry @ Jul 3rd 2006 6:45AM]

Ok lets clear up some confusion.

This is a BD-R. That means a "blank" disk it is not for prerecorded content. If you stick this disk in your $1000 BlueRay player it will not know what to do with it.

These will be for data storage NOT movies/tv shows. Now some smart guy will say that he can copy/compress HD content onto one disk and watch it on his computer. Well I guess that is true but 1) HD content is going to be DRM to hell and 2) that isn't what most people think of when they think full season on 1 disk.

Lets also not get 2 carried away. HD (1080P) content requires about 12GB - 15GB / hour using mpeg4/VC1/H.264 for compression. This will produce a near flawless reproduction. Now you could double the bitrate but it is unlikely u will see much improvement past that point.

These disks then (if they could be used for movies/tv shows) could hold about 12-14 hours of HD content. Since average season of a TV shows has (16 hours) that means u cant even put one season much less every single episode made on 1 disk.

There really is no reason for content producers to put movies / video on these disks. THEY WILL NOT PLAY IN STANDARD BLUERAY PLAYERS. Even if in 2 years someone comes out with an 8x capable STB reader. What about the millions of people who bought first gen. Are you going to sell 2 copies of "Friends" one on 8X disks compatible only with 8x players and one on 2X disks compatible with everyone else.

Last thing is the price. Now I am just guess here but I expect this media to be released around $200 / disk (current single layer & dual layer disks are aprox $20 layer and are nowhere as complex as an 8 layer BR disk).
Why? Margins. Most media companies (TDK) included have been killed by the dropping margins on first CD then DVD then DVD-R media. BD-R and HD-DVD media will be commodidity before long. However TSK could keep prices artifically high on these disks by aiming for the corporate market. 200GB tape backup systems are insanely expensive and would be a lucrative market for TDK to jump into (although likely they will need a BD-RW disk for that).

Combine a enterprise level 8X recorder, robotic arm to handle multiple media, bit to bit accuracy check (i.e record then readback bit then record next bit, etc) like DVD-RAM, and a 200GB rewritable disk in a CADDY and you have a potentially useful candidate for enterprise level backup. The price? Well just check out current prices for 200GB robotic tape backup systems. I seriously doubt this is headed for joe sixpack consumer anytime soon.

[Jerry @ Jul 3rd 2006 6:51AM]

"ever forget that for HD games, all the textures used will have to be made higher resolution in order to not render as crap. The latest 3d cards support textures of the size of something like 5000x5000pixel and up. Store that with lossless compression and with multiple levels of detail, again, huge."

Um all current computer games would be classified as HD gaming. Also most still come on CD. Very few on DVD. Even if the size of games exceeded 10GB most likely they would just put it on 2-3 DVD. Maybe once format wars are over in say 5-7 years game may be released on HD-DVD or BlueRay but even then 30GB or 50GB is more storage then 3-5 DVD and should be fine for a very long time. There simply is 0 need for 200GB game. First of all you would limit the game to only those users who have a Blueray drive and not just a BlueRay drive but one capable of reasing 8x media (hint PS3 will not). Then are u going to play from the media. Hell No. So u need to copy and uncompress this 200GB which likely would take 300-500GB of hard drive space. Get a clue 200GB is for corporate world, or video work, authoring, or backups. 200GB is not for games, watching prerecorded content or personal storage.

[Karl Viklund @ Jul 3rd 2006 10:00AM]

This is why the war is already over. HD-DVD is todays Betamax with 15 Gb per layer, pfff.

[iceatcs @ Jul 3rd 2006 10:40AM]

"These will be for data storage NOT movies/tv shows."

Nah it can. I can do that just like dvd. My dvds already hold 12 shows on each disc using the xvid codecs. Now my shelf is full up and it would be nice to reduce number of discs.

[Eric @ Jul 3rd 2006 7:59PM]

Jerry: The difference between PC gaming and console gaming is that PC games are copied to the HDD, while console games are run off the disc. So, yeah, console games need larger discs until they're able to have large portions pre-loaded to the HDD, which kind of defeats the appeal of install-free consoles.