Toshiba, NEC Plan To Create Yet Another Optical Format

selderrr writes: "Dow Jones Newswires is reporting today that Toshiba and NEC are planning to propose a new optical disk format to the DVD Forum that will offer four times more storage capacity than current DVDs. In February, a consortium of nine companies, including Sony and Matsushita, announced a new format that would offer 50GB of data storage. While the Toshiba/NEC option is smaller at 40GB, it is cheaper to produce. The two disc formats will not be compatible." Related, coryboehne writes "The New York Times has a great report detailing the history of the DVD. According to the article digital videodiscs and their players have now surpassed the VHS in terms of sales for the first time (In 2001, $10.3 billion was spent on movies, 52% of this on DVD's, now compare this to 2002, $12.4 billion total revenue with 65%, going for DVD's) . Funny considering that DVD's are only in about a third of American homes (about 30 million households, and consider that a quarter of these homes have more than one player), compare that to the unbelievable amount of VHS players (about 90% of homes in the USA have a VHS player) and it quickly shows just how popular the DVD has become."

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Blu-ray DVD Specs (cartridges?)

[rtos]

Here are the Blu-ray DVD specifications for those who are interested. And pay attention to that cartridge dimension spec give above, for the "easy to use optical disc cartridge [that] protects the optical disc's recording and playback phase from dust and fingerprints." The fact that they use cartridges was news to me.

Blu-ray Disc Specifications

Recording capacity: 23.3GB / 25GB / 27GB
Laser wavelength: 405 nm (blue-violet laser)
Lens numerical aperture (NA): 0.85
Data transfer rate: 36 Mbps
Disk diameter: 120mm
Disk thickness: 1.2mm
Optical trasmittence protection layer: 0.1mm
Recording format: Phase change recording
Tracking format: Groove recording
Tracking pitch: 0.32um
Shortest pit length: 0.160/18.0/19.5 Gbits/in2
Recording phase density: 16.8/18.0/19.5 Gbits/in2
Video recording format: MPEG-2 video
Audio recording format: AC3, MPEG-1, Layer 2, etc.
Video and audio multiplex format: MPEG-2 transport stream
Cartridge dimensions: Approx. 129x131x7mm

Source: EE Times February 25, 2002

For reference, current DVD disks employ a 650-nm red laser, bond 0.6-mm-thick disks and specify a 0.6 NA according to the same article.

The companies supporting Blue-ray are: Hitachi Ltd., LG Electronics Inc., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Pioneer Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Sharp Corporation, Sony Corporation, and Thomson Multimedia.