Kaai and Soraa already working up Blu-ray successor?

Simmer down -- it's not like you haven't seen advancements in blue laser technology before, and even though the current format war may still be raging when either's successor rolls into town, Kaai and Soraa are already looking to the future. Reportedly, Khosla Ventures has invested in both of the aforementioned firms, and while company representatives aren't disclosing much at the moment, we do know that the duo is exploring ways to "exploit gallium nitride, which is also the basis for existing blue LEDs and blue lasers." Apparently, they'd like to concoct suitable replacements for conventional LEDs in the lighting market and make a showing in the optical data storage arena, too. But seriously, with 200GB Blu-ray discs, who needs to worry about the next best thing?

[Image courtesy of DigitalHomeMag]

[CUBSWILLWIN @ Feb 12th 2008 7:40PM]

we don't need another format war yet. I'm tired of the arguments

[tekdroid @ Feb 12th 2008 8:25PM]

if anything, we need multiple format wars and healthier competition. That is what makes for technological progress. I'd hate to be around for another 10+ years of dvd-esque stagnation before the CE-powers-that-be decide on the next advancement for us.

Bring in the traditional CE and computer firms to fight it out with a multitude of innovative formats.

For one, we need more removable optical storage for PCs, and we need it without Hollywood's DRM, nor their ability to play their movies natively, nor their permission or hidden royalties. How 'bout a pure, high-capacity ultra-reliable pure affordable removable storage format without all the crap? I'd love to see it happen soon.

[DWells55 @ Feb 12th 2008 8:43PM]

I'm all for competition resulting in better deals for the consumer, but after the recent format war being nothing but a petty fight and leaving us with still high prices and some people with obsolete players, the last thing we need is another format war. Blu-Ray won, it does the job nicely, and I want my Blu-Ray player that I'm picking up in a week or two to be relevant for as long as DVD was.

[Wwhat @ Feb 13th 2008 7:00AM]

My thoughts exactly tekdroid, give us something without DRM/movies and steep licensing costs for storage already.
But making better blue LED/lasers isn't about a format of disks anyway of course, it's more about making blu-ray/HD-DVD drives cheaper to make.

PS. I said it before and I say it again: why didn't someone make a green-ray format? green lasers are well established technology and cheaper to produce and would still have a shorter wavelength than red to enable higher density disks.

[Sime @ Feb 12th 2008 7:40PM]

" But seriously, with 200GB Blu-ray discs, who needs to worry about the next best thing?"

me =)

[Justin @ Feb 12th 2008 7:42PM]

"The rest of the story at 11. Actually, that's pretty much it. Oh but there will be other things. I'm turning down the thermostat. See Diane's erect nipples at 11!"

[Ian @ Feb 12th 2008 7:55PM]

o 11 o'clock i am so there!

[Smithers @ Feb 12th 2008 7:45PM]

Instead of creating a new format, we should work on moving the standard optical disc size from 12cm to 8cm. That way we could in turn have even smaller DVD/Blu Ray players, possibly smaller game consoles and we might just be able to squeeze the DVD drive in the MacBook Air. :)

[Asha @ Feb 12th 2008 9:04PM]

I think they should improve the USB and power ports on the Mac Book Air before trying to squeeze an mini optical drive into it, but I do totally agree on the need for smaller sized discs. How many people actually need the super high rez video quality anyway?

Personally, I am not going to give up regular DVD until the follow up for Blu-Ray comes out.

[dcny @ Feb 12th 2008 10:48PM]

Thats exactly what im wondering why the hell do we see mini dvd+ &-r how many years after the format comes out why not start with the plan on making the disc 8cm from the get go

I don't know why they wont just do that i don't want a player thats the size of a stack of encyclopedias when you could just use 8cm disc and have a player thats around the size of 3 or 4 dvd cases

[Wwhat @ Feb 13th 2008 7:03AM]

I recall hearing that they already created camcorders that use mini-blu-ray.
here's a link:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/02/verbatim-to-launch-mini-blu-ray-discs-with-hitachis-camcorder/

[Khris @ Feb 12th 2008 7:46PM]

"But seriously, with 200GB Blu-ray discs, who needs to worry about the next best thing?"

Exactly....and 640K is more memory than anyone will ever need!!

[NightBlade @ Feb 12th 2008 7:57PM]

lol you beat me to it.

[farfisa @ Feb 12th 2008 7:58PM]

They better come up with a good name for it!

[Zoesch @ Feb 13th 2008 12:24AM]

I can see it now... Bluest Ray!

[blue @ Feb 12th 2008 7:58PM]

test

[boe @ Feb 14th 2008 3:35PM]

You could give them 1 terabyte of storage and they'd still release the movies without DTS MA or DD HD, without the extended edition first and then they'd release a good version a year later.

[rainfreak @ Feb 12th 2008 8:15PM]

"Apparently, they'd like to concoct suitable replacements..." I thought that said coconut.

[FreeRange @ Feb 12th 2008 8:22PM]

Thank you. That made my day.

[EMoShunz @ Feb 12th 2008 8:21PM]

i think the next gen is already decided. and by the time quad hd (1080p x2 or 720p x3), or udtv (1080p x4) is ready, holographic storage should be at a good price and 1.6tb /disc with a data transfer rate that is insane.

[Joshua Walters @ Feb 12th 2008 8:23PM]

Stop the madness!

I still dont even have a BlueRay/HD-DVD player!

[JP23 @ Feb 12th 2008 8:33PM]

Paging TruthTalker, where art thou TruthTalker.

[Patrick @ Feb 12th 2008 8:39PM]

If I can get a DVD player by this fall, I should never be more than one generation behind. I kid. :) However, this is not the case with everyone. VHS still abounds here and there.

[Sime @ Feb 12th 2008 8:47PM]

yay. soon u will be able to store the entire lifetime of a show onto one disc. better go break out my star trek collecetion =)

[PGP-Protector @ Feb 12th 2008 8:49PM]

200G ?
I'd love to have more storage than that
Raw video, Multi TB Storage Backup Ect.
Why use 20+ Disk to backup the data when I could use 1 5TB disk ?

[Snowdog @ Feb 12th 2008 8:57PM]

Something in a research lab has nothing to do with a movie format. Look at how long DVD has lasted and look how long we have been on Standard Def TV's: Decades. 1080P will have at least another Decade long run, probably more like 20 years.

It will actually be much hard to move beyond 1080p than it was to move to 1080p. A lot of todays HD TV shows and some movies are shot digitally and only in 1080p so all that material is locked.

Another thing people don't know is that your typical megaplex doesn't even deliver 1080p from film and that film starts to reach the point of diminishing returns not much after 1080p with closer views of grain and motion blur.

BluRay is going to be as good as it gets in your home for until sometime past 2020.

Now for computer removable disk storage, yeah, we change formats at the drop of a hat on that. Probably every 5 years, floppy->CD->DVD->BluRay. It helps massivily that BluRay players and PS3 will help drop the price of the lasers to get us cheap computer BluRay drives soonish.

I predict in about 5 years most of us will have BluRay computer drives (as they will be >$50 with >$2 media) and the some new terrabyte holo thing will be talked about for storage, but still not a movie replacement.

[Gremlin @ Feb 12th 2008 8:58PM]

With 25GB discs selling for $20 a pop, and 50GB running at $40, I don't know if 200GB discs will ever become a reality. 500GB hard drives sell for $100 now...

[theHun @ Feb 13th 2008 12:21AM]

the day they sell movies in hard drives is finally upon us!

[stephenbratz2 @ Feb 12th 2008 9:03PM]

"But seriously, with 200GB Blu-ray discs, who needs to worry about the next best thing?"

So when the argument is HD DVD vs. Blu-ray, we need all that extra space on Blu-ray for uncompressed audio, being able to store entire seasons of TV shows on fewer disks (meaning fewer times to get up and change the disk), etc. But when something else will be available that could hold more - which could mean uncompressed video (to me, much more important than uncompressed lossless audio vs. compressed lossless audio) and TV seasons that will fit on one disk - Blu-ray is good enough. Maybe with that extra space, Disney can fit a POTC and the extras (which, we have been told by Blu fans, are useless) on one disk.

[JuggleNuts @ Feb 12th 2008 9:14PM]

It's called SSD

[trevor @ Feb 12th 2008 10:34PM]

no... that was the successor to HHD.

This is about the successor to BD/HD-DVD.

[Zephyr @ Feb 14th 2008 6:23AM]

Flash/SSD, whatever you like. Optical storage needs to be replaced IMO.

[Allen @ Feb 12th 2008 9:23PM]

I know everyone is snickering "640K memory is all you will ever need," but in actuality not even the full 50 gigs on a Blu-Ray disc is actually being utilized yet.

I've mentioned before that I work at BestBuy, and I have a pretty healthy relation with my Sony rep(we've even played golf together, although it was a Sony hosted event for BestBuy employees so I guess thats me and 20 other people who work at my store). He has told me that on the dual layer discs, due to standard rates of compression in the codecs most discs actually only end up being fed up to 20 gigabytes, which is less than even single layer discs have a total capacity for. The reason for dual and quad layer discs was to beat HD DVD in the capacity game, not to fit all the information on the disc.

Try this: take some hi def video you download online (try some 720p game trailers for starters) and burn them to a standard DVD. Most of them fit just fine in WMA. Now try and find some 1080p trailers (they are there), and see how many of them will fit on a standard dual layer DVD.

You will not get feature film lengths on a dual-layer DVD, but I can squeeze 30 minutes of 720p on there really easy. The 30gigabyte HD DVD's held, in the same codecs, 2 hours of 1080p video with 7.1 Channel lossless audio and all the bonus features (and as Engadget pointed out, a while ago more features appeared on HD DVD than on Blu-Ray movies).

When a single layer BD disc is holding 1080p, 7.1 Channel Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD and all the special features (as my Sony rep so informs), a 200gig disc is plenty for this generation of television technology. And as CNET reports, most people won't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p until you go beyond a 50 inch screen, hence 1080p is not really that relevant yet, its just what manufacturers have used to keep prices higher these past two years.

So when will 200gig BD discs be a pre-requisite? Oh they will be, but only when we all have a Panasonic 150" plasma that needs 3840x2160 resolution to maintain as good a picture as a 60" 1080p screen. Anyone buying better than that is just plain stupid.

[tekdroid @ Feb 12th 2008 9:36PM]

you are speaking of video needs only. There's the data storage uses as well. 25GB or 50GB just doesn't come across as all to capacious in the internet age.

A typical example involving (older yet ubiquitous) video is archiving DV tapes to disc (yes we're talking standard definition, but useful nonetheless). Each standard miniDV tape holds around 13GB. a 25GB disc can hold basically two such tapes without further lossy compression (while retaining the ability to edit the footage lighning fast in nearly all editors at any future date without having to dump the tapes to disc real-time again). Even a 50GB disc is not much given data storage scenarios like this one, or larger downloads.

In the age of multi-hundred gigabyte hard drives and more and more internet downloads, removable opticals should be moving faster, IMO.

[Allen @ Feb 13th 2008 4:01PM]

If you are using optical storage to archive content, then you deserve to be undercut. Just use portable hard drives, they are cheaper, last longer (that is, if you leave them unplugged when not in use), and can store oodles more than any disc at a more attractive price.

As far as storing multiple movies on one disk, I don't know of anyone or any group claiming to be pushing this, much less with $300 blu-ray burners anyone actually considering it a viable option in the age of the portable drive. And for archiving purposes, compression is ok. Especially if you use good compression. And you do not have to worry about write times (still WAY to slow on a Blu-Ray drive) if you are writing and reading.

I know people at DICE (no I cannot get you free swag, I just met them on a Scandinavian tour) and the whole studio is getting to be disc free. Portable drives are taking over for data storage not done on a server/massive RAID array basis. Why? Cheaper and easier to use than storage discs.

[BowserUSC @ Feb 12th 2008 9:44PM]

The next format will be either holographic or based on some broadband download service so there would actually be no need for a new format besides work done on hdd and such.

[Mike @ Feb 12th 2008 9:52PM]

I own neither bluray or hddvd, have seen both in action and love the quality, but will not buy any product marketed in a marketing war. I want a product that 90% of people can agree on so we can focus on feature improvement and similar consumer interests.

[yoggit @ Feb 12th 2008 11:05PM]

"But seriously, with 200GB Blu-ray discs, who needs to worry about the next best thing?"

Engadget for one!

[Matt @ Feb 12th 2008 10:03PM]

Yeah, and when I bought my P2-300 machine back in 1998, I wondered if I would ever need a drive bigger than 20GB...

[jacquerr @ Feb 12th 2008 10:17PM]

not that I don't enjoy reading this

"640K is more memory than anyone will ever need!!"

Every time memory/storage is brought up...maybe engadget could just use that quote as it's signature sign off...

that and

"put a nail in it, it's done"

and

sha na na na...i believe they said, yeah yeah yea (instead of hey hey hey)...goodbye!

[NONE @ Feb 12th 2008 10:32PM]

They are going to call it the Iomega Super-Blu Zip drive!

[bdkennedy1 @ Feb 12th 2008 11:10PM]

By the time this comes to market and at an affordable price, it still won't allow for more storage space than with the products we have today. 250gb by then will mean nothing. Fit a terabyte on it for $15 and we'll talk.

[lovegun @ Feb 13th 2008 12:28AM]

Finally, something to replace my laser disc player with.

[OddManOut @ Feb 13th 2008 1:33AM]

"...with 200GB Blu-ray discs, who needs to worry about the next best thing?"

Yeah! 64k should be enough memory for ANYONE! Er-wait...uh...what were we talking about !?!?

[Prey521 @ Feb 13th 2008 1:58AM]

Repost

[Curtis the Claw Game Master @ Feb 13th 2008 1:00AM]

"Insert comment about how HD Downloads are the real winner blah blah blah"

/sarcasm

[jacquerr @ Feb 13th 2008 6:17AM]

ooo! first to repost repost.

[tamarok @ Feb 13th 2008 1:17PM]

When DVD came out there was no challenger, and nothing was even on the cards to potentially replaces it. The Blu-ray victory over HD-DVD is going to be short lived, since new disk format with higher capacity are already nearing the market, namely holographic storage disks.

Add to this upscaling DVD players and anyone educated about what is happening is likely to skip out on Blu-ray.