Cheaper Alternative to Blu-ray and HD-DVD

Technocrat

Cheaper Alternative to Blu-ray and HD-DVD

zogger

Wed Mar 15 08:59:29 -0800 2006

Electronics.

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A company is showing a much cheaper way to get huge capacities in optical discs. Just add more layers to a normal DVD using standard red laser technology. They are pushing it as an alternative to the high def optical disc war going on now between the Blu-ray and HD-DVD camps.

...."The system is called Versatile Multilayer Disc (VMD) and it uses the same red-laser technology that is used on current DVDs. In contrast both HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc use blue lasers. The color of the laser is important because it determines the size of the laser dot on the disc's recording layer and that determines the amount of space required to store data. Blue is a shorter wavelength than red so the dot is smaller, data can be stored in a smaller space and so more data can be stored on a disc."...more there
New Medium Enterprises VMD tech

Cheaper Alternative to Blu-ray and HD-DVD

rubycodez

Wed Mar 15 14:41:57 -0800 2006
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perhaps the blue-laser companies could add more layers also, perhaps to 1 TB of storage

Cheaper Alternative to Blu-ray and HD-DVD

deek

Wed Mar 15 17:23:08 -0800 2006
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Yep, the blu-ray specs allow for more layers than just two. TDK have already come up with a prototype 4 layer, that stores 100GB. They're apparantly researching 8 layers already.

Dirac, Theora, Vorbis

lars

Thu Mar 16 01:53:50 -0800 2006
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It would be nice to see some unencumbered codecs be used it subsequent generations of optical storage instead of stuff like VC-1 which comes with a veritable legal mine field of (in the US) patents and other issues.