The boffins over at Hitachi have knocked together a quad layer Blu-Ray disc capable of holding up to 100 GB of glorious movie action. Whilst 100 GB Blu-Ray discs are nothing new, the good news about the Hitachi version is that it is the first 100 GB BR disc to only require a firmware update to existing Blu-Ray players to handle the extra capacity sported by these discs.

There’s still one glitch in the system to sort out regarding stabilising signal quality, but once the boffins have figured that out look for a commercial rollout not long after and of course the deal-clinching price tag on these suckers.

Hitachi are also currently researching an eight layer (octo layer?) disc which boosts the capacity up to a massive 200 GB. So it looks like the boffins won’t be unemployed any time soon.

Anyway the game continues with no end in sight, as disc capacity increases, at a rate possibly surpassing demand judging by the sales or lack of sales of hi def movies, however the increase in media capacity drives the storage manufacturers to squeeze more zeros and ones into their boxes. Also the processor guys have to ramp up the grunt at their end to handle larger files and of course memory sticks have to increase their size appropriately too.

Do we really need all this extra media capacity, processor power etc? Are we becoming more savvy in our entertainment and data needs and these advances are only keeping up with an existing consumer demand or are the manufacturers trying to strip every single hard-earned penny from wallets? Let me know what you think.

Source: Electronista

With TDK announcing its 200GB Blu-ray disc last August, Maxell (owned by Hitachi) have now announced the development of their own 200GB mutha disc (NOT pictured on the right). These big boys have eight layers of data instead of the standard one increasing a Blu-ray’s capacity from a mere 50GB to 200.

With such storage capacity hard drive backups will become a breeze and they’ll be enough video on one disc to keep a hardened couch potato happy for quite a while! Maxell are estimating that the discs will be commercially available sometime in 2009.

Source: i4u