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Blu-Ray DVDs Hit 100 GB
Xesdeeni writes "According to The Register and MacWorld, TDK has unveiled a Blu-Ray DVD with four layers that will hold a whopping 100 GB of data. This is shortly after the previously reported HD-DVD announced three-layer HD-DVD that would hold a "mere" 45 GB. Unfortunately, this is also on the heels of the news that the HD DVD unification talks have stalled."
If I recall correctly, Blu-Ray has come out with some kind of coating for their disks that makes them highly resistive to being scratched or otherwise maimed unless you really really want to mess them up. There was even an article on it previously on Slashdot, but I can't be bothered to look it up
Not only do we get to see the movie in HD, we can see the filming of the movie also in HD, and from different camera angles.
Just think, we can have more blooper minutes than actual movie minutes.
And George Lucas can remake the entire Star Wars series in HD and fit it onto 1 disc, with tons of extras.
Many TV shows are shot on film. The problem is that some of them scan the film to SD digital video before adding special effects and doing the post-production.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
They know they need to collude if they want to maximize profits. Not having a standard is going to hurt everybody.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
The consumer versions would probably be coated by this: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6583 As stated in the News section of blu-ray.com Oct 30, 2004 - TDK Develops New Hard-Coating Technology for Blu-ray Discs Also, i'd like to comment that it's wrong to call a Blu-ray media DVD.. it's not like you go calling your DVD's CD's either, do you?
A stereo mix gives you just two channels into which you have to place all of your content. Generally bass content is placed fairly equally into both channels, and bass takes up a large percentage of the energy an average speaker can produce. So it's quite difficult to carve out a unique space on the virtual stage for each instrument, balancing frequency, amplitude, depth, etc., for all the instruments and allow each of them to be heard without overwhelming either of the speakers.
Surround, especially with a separate subwoofer, gives you a much larger virtual stage, which allows you to make creative choices with your instrument placement, and rather than having to squeeze them into what's left of a stereo speaker's capacity.
I'm asking myself exactly the same question.. what's the likely price per unit.. because the bigger question is Is this the new price leader for large-scale storage? Currently, disk is about $0.40/GB ($80 for a 200GB disk) and tape is $0.25/GB ($50 for a 200GB LTO2 tape). While these will definitely fall by the time these disks come out, they probably can't come close to 6 or 4 cents per gig.
Plus, though tapes are pretty cost effective on a per gig basis, the actual machines for accessing them are tres expensivo. Look at the ADIC Scalar series. A Scalar 24 costs about 10k. Now consider that a 400 CD changer goes for ~$200 at Amazon... That's currently in a different market segment, but for how long? Even when the CD changer makers decide to price gauge the data consumer, they won't be able to go too far without being outcompeted from below.
That means the ETA to a, let's say $50k petabyte system, is a couple of years.
E.g. let's say the Blue-Rays get up to 200GB each at a price point of $10 each (conservative). That's 5000 discs for 1PB and so $50k, which is much better than the alternative medias by a factor of between 2 (tape) and 5-20 (offline and online disk). But more importantly, it will take only 10 cheap disk changers to access all 5000 disks needed.
The one big gotcha here is that the discs are write-once, read-many. But for certain applications, e.g. video, this is ideal. And it just so happens that folks like Microsoft's Chief Researcher, Jim Gray, think that video is what we'll fill this next generation of capacity with.