Blu-ray won the optical format war against HD DVD and one of the reason to pick Blu-ray was the superior storage capacity. Even if it can now reign freely the development has continued and Pioneer has now revealed a new Blu-ray disc that utilize the progress of the technology. The storage capacity of Pioneer’s recently unveiled Blu-ray disc is no less than 8 times higher than today’s discs. The two-layer discs we have today can store up to 50GB, Pioneer has used 16 layers to accomplish a capacity of 400GB.
Pioneer has earlier presented research that suggested up to 20 layers in a single Blu-ray disc for a total capacity of 500GB. This was in theory though, but it has now presented the first functioning 400GB disc and it can be used by regular Blu-ray readers.
Writable discs will not appear until two to four years, but Pioneer’s super multi-layer technology really shows that Blu-ray is still being improved. We will hardly see any HD movies being released on these discs anytime soon, but at the same time the playback chips inside our Blu-ray players will become the bottleneck with such extremely high definition material.
16 layer Blu-ray disc from Pioneer with 400GB capacity
