New optical disc standard steps out

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By Matt Whipp

Posted on 25 Feb 2002 at 11:07

Nine companies have signed up to a blue-laser high capacity optical disc format, paving the way for a unified next-generation DVD.

The Blu-ray Disc specification is an optical disc format that uses a blue laser (current optical technology uses red lasers). The new specifications should result in capacities of up to 27Gb on a single-sided disc and up to 50Gb on doubled-sided discs along with far greater bandwidths for data transfer of 36Mbits/sec.

It uses the global standard MPEG-2 Transport Stream compression technology which is optimised for broadcast of digital content. The discs will also be able to store data for back-up purposes as well.

Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and Thomson Multimedia have all agreed to the Blu-ray Disc and will soon finalise the specification, hoping to avoid the foofaraw of the competing DVD standards. However, a potential fly in the ointment is the absence of Toshiba, which made a similar announcement of a breakthrough in blue-laser optical disc technology recently and could potentially follow its own proprietary standard to compete with Blu-ray Disc.