Sony Upping Blu-Ray Capacity Soon
Sony, in conjunction with Panasonic, have announced that Blu-Ray discs are about to get a bit larger in capacity.
..what they said.
A recent report from Nikkei states that until now, a more dense Blu-Ray single layer disc with a capacity of 33.4 GB would not be reliably read frequently enough by today’s technology. Apparently, Sony and Panasonic solved this problem:
Sony and Panasonic Corp. resolved this by developing the i-MLSE (Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation) evaluation index. Details of i-MLSE were announced at International Symposium on Optical Memory 2009 (ISOM ’09), held in October 2009.
The article goes a bit more in-depth, but the bottom line is that we will soon see 33.4 GB single-layer and 66.8 GB dual-layer Blu-Ray discs in the near future. Additionally, any device that can receive a firmware upgrade will be able to read the new format with a simple update. This is great news for Blu-Ray multimedia enthusiasts (gamers especially) everywhere!
7 Responses to “Sony Upping Blu-Ray Capacity Soon”
And here I thought Blu-ray discs were already huge enough. Guess I was wrong
However, I am left wondering about PC Blu-ray drives(I just bought a computer with a Blu-ray burner) Will it be as simple as a driver update, or will it be more difficult to get a PC-based Blu-ray drive to read the new discs?
I’m hoping the next gen of home consoles we will see a form of flash card for games.
With faster loading and possibly saves kept on the card itself.
blu-ray rules
waht about the quad layer that was speculated a while back?
I think what needs to happen is that the gaming community needs to look at a “Back to The Future” technology to store games that is compatible with the speeds of today’s system and graphics memory. I agree with going back to a cartridge like game storage medium. With flash memory costs and interface speeds faster than optical media we as gamers should hold all game console and maybe even PC games to a different standard.
I cast my vote for Flashcards or even SSD cards…
Interesting ideas. You’d think with all this ultra-high technology, they’d set about trying to find a way to get rid of load times, which really are one of the biggest inconveniences in games these days. Having a bazillion GB of data is great but if you’re sitting there waiting for it to load a hundred different times, it’s impact is somewhat reduced.
hello …
Blu-ray is good for today, having more capacity ensures more content, but developers must work hard to get more on it.
The PS3 & PC blu-ray drives are firmware upgradeable so i think would support bigger capacities, i don’t know for some prototype though (300+Gb BDr anyone!?)…
I think future gaming machines would continue to use cheaper optical drives over flash memory, maybe in two generations that will change.
SSD cards seems a good idea but cost too much, i think they’ll still go for higher capacity hard-disks on the system with digital download + Blu-ray (SONY mostly) + Flash card / SSD drive bays … that will be great for higher range & backward compatibility.
i just wish i live long enough to see all of this
cheers!