Pioneer shows off 16-layer 400GB Blu-ray Disc, affirms compatibility with current players
By Darren Murph 
posted Dec 2nd 2008 7:35AM
posted Dec 2nd 2008 7:35AM
Please note: If you're a current Engadget commenter, you do not need to re-register. Simply login and you will be prompted to select a username.
Seriously getting tired of the pathetic models-holding-new-technology strategy. What ever happened to just using a whitescreen background?
But if you show her a 400gb blu-ray disc she'll sleep with you.
She makes me thick.
wodhelia, skipping school made you thick, don't kid yourself.
It's mostly the Asian press shots that do that, although it is getting more popular stateside.
Oh come on, you know it's mostly a male audience that cares about crap like 400GB BluRay discs. Like what's the likely ratio of guys to girls even buying a BluRay player (for themselves-whining until your girl buys you a BluRay player doesn't count).
Man, we've come a long way since the floppy...
Nothing in that pic makes me think floppy...
"but HD-DVD will win cause it costs less to manufacture than Blu Ray..."
-some dummy on Engadget
More like hard disk...
WHERE IS YOUR 360 NOW??? HAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Also, predict a rise in PS3 sales if these things become cheaper. And PS3 firmware is updated to support 4320p video playback.
We've come a long way since data tape....... I think I have some in my "archival" storage...... It still blows my mind how my phone has more computing power than my first computer I bought with my own money.....
Cant believe one day someone will laugh about using up terabytes of information.......
"Nothing in that pic makes me think floppy..."
I don't know, a disk in a casing reminds me of something... Oh yea! A floppy.
So that's what pioneer looks like.
This is fail posting in comments, but I'm doing it anyway.
Data BDs... w00t!!
-Pie
Well let me get the ball rolling on this...damn engadget more hot Asian girls. I am loving it. Also nice more blu ray storage spec news
Jesus, if she is hot I'd hate to see your ugly. Look at the painful smile for a start. Now I'm not saying she is ugly, but she definitely isn't hot. Think average!
lol that girl is proper ugly... what are you talking about!?
Avarage.. to ugly, let me guess you compare her to the pr0n pics you got in your basement?
That said, rather amusing that whatever is being showed off by some goodlooking girl who most likely has no clue what she is holding. Marketing seems sometimes so often, grab a good looking chick, put product X in a shiney box ... profit!
think dog
When is the digital delivery revolution gonna happen? I don't want another dumb disc type... Hurry up and make my internet faster, so I can keep my movies in my locker online, instead of walking around like a dumbass with a disc in my hand...
Just try to say this without sounding retarded "I have a disc in my hand"...
You CAN'T DO IT!
The real question is when is the digital detachable penis revolution going to happen? I'm sick of having it itch and would like to upload and download it at will.
Yeah..because nothing is more hot then a guy showing a girl a disc
scratch the disc, girl alone will do :)
i think you misspelled something...
What are you talking about? I can't keep my girlfriend off me when I show her my different storage capabilities
Cash, credit card and loans capability?
...she's hot...? Lee Hyori is hot, Mina is hot, my filipina ex-girlfriend is hot.
Get out more.
That's totallly unfair to compare a Korean girl (Lee Hyori) to a chinese girl (like the model with a terrible smile)
any chinese girl, can't hold a candle to any korean girl out there.
Huh? What disc?
She has NO idea what she is holding.
Not if you're in the room.
That's probably what she said too...
Love the photo.
Who's Polaroid did they borrow for that shot?
They touched it up too around her face, didn't do good enough though.
Holy crap!
With this much space, I could record the next year of my life on one disc.
In SD of course.
Just so long as you edit out the going to the bathroom or engading in illegal activites parts you should be ok
Technically smearing treacle over my naked body then fellating a hot dog isn't illegal, although I wouldn't want that included on the footage either.
"a DigiTimes report asserts that these are indeed compatible with Blu-ray readers already on the market"
Does that mean the whole 400GB is accessible with current players? Or only the 50 some gigabytes of it?
Most likely all of it. I have never heard of compatible discs that can only be read for a few layers.
Imagine the whole Bond series on 1 disc. Or all LOTR extended version in 1 disc...
Wow, think of all the porn you could put on a 1TB disc....wicked!
About 1TB's worth.
So basically blu-ray has the potential to be around for a very long time... far beyond the lifespan of the 1080p standard I'm assuming. With 1tb (or even just 200gb) of storage on a disc, I'm assuming that you could have much higher native resolution films.
Just too bad that current players, even if compatible with a 200gb disc, can't output more than 1080p...
Also it's too bad that your eyes can't actually see more than 1080p...
(Unless you are sitting two inches away from a giant screen.)
I assume the intended use of this is computer data, not video. Although it would certainly make the 'full season box set' rather smaller.
Incidentally I don't really believe the discs will work in existing players, or else not all of them... let's wait and see, if they ever release it...
I don't know about that... I'm thinking it would be pretty cool to have a film that is native to the native resolution of say, a 30" computer monitor (2560x1600)...
And sure there are diminishing returns for each increase in resolution (meaning you'd have to add a lot more pixels to get the same impact if you were going above 1080p compared to going from 480p to 1080p) but if you increase the resolution far enough above 1080p it would still be noticeable, no?
"Also it's too bad that your eyes can't actually see more than 1080p..."
Sam not this shit again.
When we get 70+ inch OLED's in our home's (we are talking 2013 here) THEN U WILL SEE A DIFFERENCE FuK FACE!! GO DIE IN A FIRE.
what are you a Standard Definition fanboy?
I wonder what we could put on a 400GB disc? I mean, I'm not saying "Oh, we'll never use this!" but in the next few years -- what do you seriously put on a 400GB disc?
For personal use, it's too risky to backup data on a 400GB drive. Even though Blu-ray is less susceptible to disc rot than DVDs are, I can't trust myself to keep it in the right conditions. Maybe corporate users would like it as an archiving medium, and I imagine they would keep it in a proper, safe environment..
I can see our UK government using this to safely and securely back up the country's child benefit information. Oh wait. ¬_¬
Daza, I can't see much consumer level use for this product. But it would be great if you're archiving stuff, and possibly for uses such as digital cinema too.
"I wonder what we could put on a 400GB disc?"
"corporate users would like it as an archiving medium"
So you just answered your own question! lol!
Also, how about home-workers like myself? I certainly don't want to be messing about with tape drives & their media, nor do I want to use lots of bandwidth for an online backup option, and I certainly don't want to pay the cost and 'leccy for a load of redundant hard drives to store data on.
At the end of the day, so long as the BD discs are kept in a cool, dark, dry environment they'll easily last for a decade or more...
Ever higher video quality perhaps... Higher bitrate, more complex extra features (entire video games in the movie extras bundled with the film?) higher resolution? 1080p isn't the height of attainable home screen resolution :)
how about a complete TV season on one disc? or even a complete TV SERIES on one disc....no more Season 1, Vol. 1 etc for Transformers cartoons, etc....
Not, it's obviously not the height of resolution, but it's approaching the height of what is useful in most situations. It's already well known that even 1080p largely goes to waste on TVs
My comment got cut off by using a less than symbol... I meant to say it goes to waste on TVs less than 50" at standard viewing distances. Going higher than 1080p will mean that you will need an even bigger TV or sit even closer to truly make out the detail. Something like QuadHD might be useful for gigantic 100" TVs or projections systems, but it will be largely useless for the vast majority of users. But, of course, that doesn't mean you can market and sell them.
Dale1v lol, thats the first good comment ive read for a while!
It could reduce the number of discs in a multi-disc package. For example, BluRay supports a maximum of 48mbit/s for AV data (audio and video combined). This means that a current 50GB disc can store roughly 142 minutes of content (again, at highest bitrates). That's enough for a single movie, since actual bitrates can be adjusted lower.
A 400GB disc would bump that up to roughly 1138 minutes of content at the same bitrate (no doubt Lucas will be pleased). That's enough for an entire 24-episode season of an hour-long show (assuming 45 minutes per episode, after commercials are removed).
So, being able to store an entire HD season on a single disc is certainly a big advantage.
Even if BD holds 1TB, they will still release TV shows on 10 discs and 1 hour movies with extras on 4 discs to make money. I was so excited to see Band of Brothers on BD, but it's just as many discs as DVD. Why?
That is just because 50GB blu-ray holds about the same length of video in 1080p as DVDs did with standard def.
Man, how many times does this have to be hammered into people's heads?
It's a DATA disc, NOT a BD designed for movies.
Like, you know, 400gb to 1TB backups... Data.
-Pie
Maybe the only place for this thing is corporate backups? I bet the price per gig makes it meaningless for consumers.
That is why Blu-ray isn't having the popularity that DVD had. To be as mainstream as the DVD is, they need to lower prices on their recordable discs and drives for computers ASAP. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first one waiting for the price drop to start backing up 25Gb on a single disc.
Also the transfer speeds on blue is crap, correct?
I wonder how long till 1TB disks are being sold in packs of 100 for $4.99 buy one get one free?
If you use a paper punch, you can double the capacity!
How about making the existing technology more affordable and available to the public first? The 25GB blanks are outrageously expensive and the players themselves still haven't hit a price level for wide consumer acceptance.
With this thing coming out into the market, the prices of lower end BD products will obviously fall. That's what has happened with every piece of electronics since forever. I thought that was pretty simple to see.
Disc be damned. I guess you need to be an athlete or rich fart to qualify to that arm candy: http://gawker.com/5099892/following-hallowed-nerd-tradition-michael-phelps-dates-asian-chick
I can't wait to see a PS3 game that's 400GB.. And Steve Jobs said that Bluray was useless.. What a douche.
Steve Jobs also said his pancreas was useless. Look where that got him!
". . .and you know you'll be waiting for the latest and greatest."
If you continually wait for the latest and greatest, you usually wind up purchasing nothing and waiting for everything.
WHO Cares about the Blu Ray disc!!!! I want the chick in the picture......
And the XBOTs actually thought HD-DVD had a shot! :-D
I don't really believe that it's compatible with current players. With many of them, perhaps. With all of them, I don't really buy it. In general if you haven't tested it, you can assume it doesn't work, and all existing players were shipped before there was an 16-layer disc to test with.
As another bummer, adding layers doesn't increase read rate. And you can't read multiple layers at once. So no matter how fast BluRay drives get, reading a 16-layer disc will take 8x as long as reading a 2-layer disc. Writing too.
I dont know if some other reader commented on this but we need to stop thinking about how much space can we cram onto plastic inexpensive discs. how about we start making the production cost of flash lower. Hardware encryption, dont have to worry about scratching your flash drive, faster read and write speeds.... i dont know but i think optical discs should be obsolete by now.
spinning is so much cooler than not spinning...
Wow!! I'm not surprised by the size but I AM surprised that it's compatible with current players. I'm wondering if they have to have their firmware upgraded or something. Although almost no consumer will ever need these discs it could be a pain to update firmware on some of the older players.
I wonder how many days it'll take to burn a full disc.
about 14 hours.
HOLY CRAP isn't the most we ever had a double layered disk? 50 gigs was still a lot.. wow, that is crazzy XD
Uncompressed 1080P 1Tb 2hr Blu-Ray FTW!!!
>> Also it's too bad that your eyes can't actually see more than 1080p...
LMAO
Seriously.... I have 2 hardrive of 1TB even if its not completly 1TB u got on these crap.. its jsut fake ads.... cause that 400gb disk ssur isn 't a complete 400 cause 1gb is 1012mb but they only calculate 1000mb.... so when they will hit that 1TB in 2013 they wont be at 1tb but only at 988 000MB meaning 988GB so I will not be much surprised to see how compagnies does sell stuff that aren't even true... and see how people would sell them-self buying those stuff that aren't even NEAR what would be written on the disk...
and by self-minding... if u buy a 1tb disk... put 1tb stuff.... drop the disk scratch or brake it... that means u will have spend 300$ on a stupid HUGE disk thats a total waste!!!!!