Although a standard Blu-Ray disc might have enough storage space for an H.264 HD movie, Pioneer reckons that the 50GB you get on a dual-layer disc isn’t going to be enough to fulfil the storage needs of the future. The solution, according to Pioneer, is a new 16-layer optical disc that’s still completely Blu-ray compatible.

The company has just successfully developed a prototype of the disc, which features 16 25GB layers, making for a colossal total of 400GB on a single disc. Making discs with more than two layers has been problematic in the past because of interference and crosstalk between the layers, but Pioneer claims to have overcome this problem using a disc structure that’s specifically aimed at reducing crosstalk from adjacent layers.

Pioneer says results ‘in a 16-layer optical disc that can playback high-quality signals from every layer, and to prove its point the company has released eye patterns from three layers across the disc.

As well as this, Pioneer says that the disc features a ‘wide-range spherical aberration compensator and light-receiving element,’ which is still able to pick up weak signals, even at a high signal-to-noise ratio. Although the disc isn’t officially a Blu-ray disc, Pioneer claims that it will still be compatible with existing Blu-ray drives. The company says that the numerical aperture of the lens needed to read the disc is the same as that needed on a Blu-ray player, so ‘it is possible to maintain compatibility between the new 16-layer optical disc and the BD discs.’

However, the disc developed so far is only read-only, and no mention has been made of writeable 16-layer discs yet. Even so, if the disc was properly developed, we don’t see why this couldn’t be possible in the future. What’s more, 400GB would allow huge movie files with hardly any compression needed. Standard Blu-ray discs contain 25GB, with 50GB on a dual-layer disc.

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Danny
DVD News Editor
http://www.dvd-and-media.com