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Panasonic Begins Blu-Ray Production
magicchex writes "Panasonic has announced that they have begun pilot Blu-Ray production of dual-layer 50GB discs in their Torrance, California factory. They claim to already have an 80% success rate in production. Engadget and The Register, among other, have also reported on this." From the Register: "Matsushita's Panasonic subsidiary has retooled its US Blu-ray Disc (BD) production line to offer not only 25GB single-layer discs but also 50GB dual-layer media ... Panasonic's plant, located in Torrance, California, is still in the pilot stage, but the company claimed it is already punching out BDs with a yield of over 80 per cent - so it has to bin fewer than 20 per cent of the discs it produces, which seems rather a lot in the context of a low-cost, mass-market medium."
Long ago I decided I was going to go with HD DVD when it came out, mostly because Sony was backing Blu-ray. I'm kind of worried that Microsoft is backing it, because they're slightly more likely than Sony to get the DRM right. Regardless, I know that I am "Mr. Betamax" when it comes to predicting future technologies. I have about a 100% track record when it comes to making early adopter choices, which means I've had to re-buy 100% of my stuff.
So, here's some free advice to everyone: when I buy my first HD DVD player, the rest of you should breathe a collective sigh of relief and buy the Blu-ray gear, because it'll be guaranteed that I chose incorrectly. :-(
John
So....finally in production...it's too bad HVDs are in the process of eating their lunch. Perhaps next time Sony/Phillips and Toshiba will see the benefit in cooperating to get a product out to the consumer quickly enough to avoid having a superior technology render their product irrelevant.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Wouldn't a 20% problem rate in the factory indicate a substantial error rate in the field as well?
So what happens to the 20% of the discs that get rejected? Is it like Intel's process of taking non-conforming Pentium chips and turning them into Celerons? Do these rejected discs then become CDRs or something?
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When you can sell that other 20% as 'value' discs.
Anyone who knows about this stuff, is 20% lost CDs much at this stage of development? How were the other companies at this point?
[sig]
How do you determine a failed disc? Record on it, read it back, see that there are errors, and bin it? Oops, the disc was good, but we can't use it now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It's easier to throw the disks out now rather than much later after they've been taking up shelf space for a year.
I read Usenet for the articles.
... the company claimed it is already punching out BDs with a yield...
"BDs" is interesting: it suggests some sort of priority over CDs. I can see the next generations as being called ADs, but that's when the competition will come up with BCs...
So, I remember reading somewhere that the new DVD's are really hostile to end-user rights. Bill Gates says so, so it must be true :)
Personally, I think whatever DRM is included by the megacorps will just get broken anyway, so I don't see the point. Remember region encoding in DVD's? It's trivial to circumvent.
With the PS3 launch coming in March - only three to four months away and disc production underway, we can finally put to rest all of the tiresome BluRay vs the dead HD-DVD talk and move on to something else to argue about.
Sony is going to sell somewhere in the 120-150 million PS3s over the next four to five years. Along with all of the early BluRay adopters snatching up players to use with their increasingly cheap 1080p displays. The era of real HD is just about to hit.
Cool.
HD and Blu Ray are already overshadowed by InPhase Technology's Holographic DVD. They're much farther ahead of the competition.
I'll buy when there's a drive that can read+write both (and CDs + DVDs)
For the "content", I'll buy it only when I can play it under linux.
(I know many people that just now got hardware DVD+DivX players, having only VCR before).
Another thing to consider is that it's a 20% failure rate on their first generation fab producing their first run discs. Lots of other technologies started out worse and I can guarentee that they'll improve that number over time. I think the point is that 80% is good enough to start scaling up the plant and mass produce the discs.
I read the internet for the articles.
It's pilot production, it'll get better. Considering the HD-DVD camp was saying the BD people couldn't do 50 GB discs until next year, 80% yield isn't so bad.
I assume that they will be able to get that failure rate down to a couple of percent or lower (I hope) but with failure rates so low on CD's and DVD's will this make next gen DVD to expensive for most things for years to come? More worrying though is what will the life expectance be of these disks. CD's are pretty tough, DVD's are fairly tough but moderatly suseptable to damage. If next gen disks are much worse than DVD's they won't be worth using. If failure rates are around 15% does this mean that a good portion of disks are close to failing as soon as they come off the production line?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
?
Whats your point?
Yield rates like that were very common in the beginning of dvd and cd production, too.
In fact i seem to remember reading about yields 50% for dual layer dvds in the beginning.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
> has to bin fewer than 20 per cent of the discs it produces
Cool! Can I have those discarded discs to use as holiday decorations?!?!
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This is where the magic of conditional probability comes in. Like someone else said, chip yields are usually below 80%, but the ones that survive burn in then they have incredibly low failure rates. I'm assuming that their tests on these are pretty stringent, so given that the item you buy came out of a well tasted batch, it's probability of failure is probably much lower. IE: .2
P(disc is bad)=.2 but P(disc is bad | disc has been tested(or something in it's batch has been tested)
The rejected ones could still be used as scarecrow in my back yard.
;)
Failed CDR and AOL CD are already good scarecrow. Birds don't like them.
Sure, I don't like the junk DRM that is coming with blue ray DVD as well. Perhaps the remaning sucessfully built 80% could be used as future customers scarecrow. Nothing here to buy, Everything on that Blue Ray DVD belong to us. Go away communist opensource, GNU, EFF customer bastard !
Léa Gris
Oh for crying out loud. It's a Japanese company that has made a substantial investment in a part of the world that you identify with but in reality is a techno-hick backwater in terms of overall reproducibility and quality control. It's trying to make the damned things, and it's telling you how well it's doing it. It's hiding the fact that failure rates would be way lower back in Japan. It's the Matsushitas of this world that get the product into your imbecilic hands, not the me-too pseudo-American brands that do little more than re-brand dumped Taiwanese product. Do get a grip on the shape of the planet.
As we continue the trend of storing larger and larger amounts of data on media such as this, it really makes me wonder when companies will focus on longevity of their product rather than storage capacity.
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Just 50GB?,
At the moment I'm quite content with the storage the average dual layer DVD holds, and the quality of the picture and sound for that matter. I believe the current capacity for DVD is sufficient for all but HDTV recording in the immediate future. 50GB dual layer media really isn't a large enough jump to secure this new technology for any length of time.
----------- Theodusian -----------
This is just the testing phase for production. There are still a LOT of kinks to work out. I belive most other first run products also suffer from extremely high failure rates. The fact that initial runs are holding at 80% and will improve is actually pretty good, They will very soon be on par with regular DVD and CD rates which have been manafactured for years and years.
Hello Bueler
Wow, talk about low quality. 2 or every 10 they make is bad. The amount of money wasted on that is crazy and it will drive up what we have to pay for it.
I've heard the figure is actually as low as 1 in 5...
Seriously though - it's early days yet and the ratio will improve as they work out the teathing problems.
Wow, talk about low quality. 2 or every 10 they make is bad. The amount of money wasted on that is crazy and it will drive up what we have to pay for it.
Oh no! I dont want to pay any more for a product than the raw material costs for that specific product! Soon they will be wanting us to pay for research and development! For factories!! And labour!!!
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
So 80% of 100 is 20%.
Yes, and at night it's colder than outside.
In other news.. it has been reported that AOL will be buying the defective CD's to label for their next advertising blitz. AOL marketing has stated that no one uses them anyway, so if they're defective it doesn't really matter..
It all depends on their sampling procedures.
h tm
"80% success rate" may mean that they have to discard 20% of their batches. For instance, if they sample 100 of a batch of 10,000 and 5 of them are bad, maybe they throw out that batch.
On the other hand, maybe they are finding that 2 in 10 are bad.
Even so, I think the failure rate is for initial quality. Longevity is a separate issue, having to do more with the durability of the media, not so much how well it's made. They're also struggling with hard coats for the discs; see here: http://www.manifest-tech.com/media_dvd/hard_coat.
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Sony, Panasonic et al are going to lose big on this one. It's not about picture quality-- it's about access to content and convenience. Downloadable music is killing CD sales even though MP3s, etc. are below the quality of even a CD, and much below SACDs. Whoever convinces the movie/tv industry to go the downloadable route and make available a 1080p video file will make all of these new discs pointless. My bet is on Apple.
Blu-ray is more interesting, cause it is a high density storage format. (More so than hd-dvd which is a continuance of dvd technology), making it possible to put 50GiB's on the one BD. 4 layers will give 100 GiB. Making a backup of a system requires that much storage and even more. Triple layer hd-dvd gives 45 GiB's.
..
everybody is talking high def video, but really who needs that. look at the poularity of lossy compression formats. is it necessary they put more "extra" stuff on the dvd's that nobody watches anyway?
in the backup industry people are used to paying for storage media. if a blu-ray dvd costs half that of a backup tape it is feasable and will be used.
anyway, they need to hurry a bit cause holographic storage is taking of too with 300 Gib's a disc, scaling up to a Terabyte / disc
Let's face it - in a Web 2.0 world, large data is going to become increasingly popular. With the advent of Podcasts many netizens all throughout the blogosphere are streaming mp3 files. All of these files have to be stored somewhere, and I see no better place than a Blu-ray disc. E-businesses everywhere will be leveraging this synergy.
Anyone any ideas how much these discs are going to cost? A large part of who wins is decided by the hit the consumer takes in his pocket. I think DVD-RAM almost died out due to the high cost of discs early on though now they've dropped in price the extra features over DVD-RW seem to be helping it to make a comeback.
From TFAS:
They claim to already have an 80% success rate in production.
And TFA:
Single-layer BD-ROM discs are currently being produced on the pilot line with more than 80% yield rates.
So keep in mind that figure wasn't about the 50 GB discs talked about in the article, and what's news here.
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I may be wrong on this point; however, it doesn't seem too likely they'll repeat the CSS mistake. That said, if the DRM they come up with is too draconian, we can be assured of a market failure which will relegate their strong DRM to the circular file of history. If they get it right, however, I won't object too strenuously.
Getting it right, by the way, includes not stepping on my reasonable fair-use rights while securing those of the copyright holders. I make the odds something just slightly less than googleplex:1 against, but only time will tell.
I don't think its so easy to circumvent the real use for DRM -control. Let's face it, DRM isn't about preventing piracy. You know it, I know it, and the MPAA and RIAA know it. Piracy is just the ruse they can sell to the public, lawmakers, etc. Do you think they could have gotten the DMCA passed if they stated they needed it, not to prevent piracy, but so they could control what users were allowed to do with the media after they purchased it?
DVDs are the perfect example of this. I've now run into 2 DVDs that won't even allow me to fast forward or skip the two trailers at the beginning. Even hitting the "Stop" button gives me an, "Operation Not Permitted" response. Disabling "Stop" does not prevent piracy, it only allows control. And my DVD manufacturer is forced to comply with the will of the MPAA, not mine. Just think of the fun when the broadcast flag gives them the same capability (or more) for controlling recordings made of over-the-air content (you will be forced to watch that commercial).
So if anyone says DRM is needed to prevent piracy, ask them how disabling the "Stop" function prevents piracy. It may seem trivial, but not being able to do that one little thing is what exposes the fraud being purpetrated by the MPAA.
Minidisc superior to the CD? In what way? surely not in sound quality.
Glad that I don't have enough cash to be an "early adopter" of these kinds of tech. Sure, it's cool with teh latest and greatest, but I rather sit back and wait until it's cheap, available, and above all - have a decided standard.
Did anyone else read "Torrent"?
Thats on topic! What else fills 50G??
Does anyone know how the pilot Blu-ray failure rate compares to the average current commercial rejection rate of CDs/DVDs?
It seems somewhat unfounded to denounce a 20% failure rate (althought, yes it does seem wasteful) without comparing this to the current, and so reasonable economical, failure rates?
Any thoughts?
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I think I know what I will buy myself this year.
It will be a combo VHS/DVD/DivX player.
Betamax was super to VHS... the tech is still used in professional applications today (Betacam). What bit Sony in the ass is they refused to licence their tech, whereas JVC wasn't so protectionist in it's outlook.
Perhaps you meant "now dead?"
blah, blah, blah...
You should always make at least two copies of any backup, no matter what the medium is.
This early in the game, I get the impression that 80% yield is pretty good. Maybe the setup, testing, and refinement procedures have improved dramatically since the early 90's, and they expect higher yields faster. But I doubt they're unhappy with that yield that early. If, for example, they expect the long run marginal production cost on one of these disks to be $0.10, then the 80% yield would only take that up to $0.125 each, which is a pretty small detail on disks that will probably sell for $8-$20 as finished products with content. Over millions of disks, those cents add up, so I'm sure they'd like to get six sigma reliability on the things, but I don't think 80% yield is a deal killer.
The CD lines at Metatec, which had been running for years, got yields in the 98-99% range. I suspect they'll hit that eventually.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Two things here : /s so that you can back up data quickly :)
1) I can tell you 50 GB is super useful for backing up data. 50 GB is useful for example I backup a lot of fMRI data and our lab has something like 10 4 TB on harddisks but when you leave labs and you want to take the data you need a few tapes which take forever to read ~ 7 hours for 80 GB is ridiculous. Backing up takes similar amount of time, it would be nice to have RELIABLE 50 gb disks and I mean really reliable because if you get a read error at some vague location then you are in a state of limbo
2) In a related note, it takes forever sometime to copy something like 50 - 100 GB of data, the read and write speeds are still in double digit Megabits per second even for super fast HDDs, this is still unacceptable, you would want really fast data transfer speeds ~100 to 200 Mbits
3) Finally even if these DVDs cost 10 to 15 dollars each, 10 of them would be cheaper than a 500 GB disk just to backup data. Although a Harddisk gives you infinite read and write, they have their own problems that they crash and stuff like that.
Just my 2 cents
Some years back, NASA distributed its archived planetary data primarily on CDs and DVDs. The growing data volume eventually made this impractical. I wonder if BluRay (and other high-density optical disks) will make it practical again to mail data directly to researchers -- as opposed to going through the Internet, which itself becomes a bottleneck at large data volumes.
Can they guarantee at least a 50 year lifespan (I have "old skool" pictures older than that) for my photos and videos? I really don't see the point of transferring family pictures and video to yet another format that will likely be useless in 20 years. Oh, wait, I forgot: who cares about priceless images, it's all about the upgrading so we can keep the economy going.
That's what I'm doing now. I'm using DVD Shrink to re-author the DVDs, losing all the unnecessary/compulsory crap; in most cases, I keep just the movie, English soundtrack and subtitles, sometimes commentary as well. Movies fit quite nicely on a single-sided DVD. Figure I can rip and recompress em to MPEG4 later (some I have done already); MPEG4 codecs are still being improved, MPEG2's stable.
;-)
DVD quality is plenty good enough for me (even DivX, quite often, particularly if I rip to a size larger than ~700MB). Good quality sound will bring a movie to life better than a pixel-perfect picture; I keep the ac3 soundtrack if I can when ripping a DVD to MPEG4.
I've just bought my first DVD writer. In fact, I bought 3 of em. I want to be able to play my movies as far into the future as possible and not have to buy em again in another format. The ones I bought do not have crippling firmware or hardware. Hopefully they'll tide me over til this DRM farce fizzles out
PS3 is reported to only come out in the Spring time in JAPAN. Based on the launch delay of the PS2 between Japan and the US, the estimate for when the US gets the PS3 is Nov 2006.
Why not China? I'm really interested to know. Maybe this is why it's a pilot project.
I've been a bit worried following the whole Blu-Ray thing because of the various DRM issues that have been raised many times (net connection, phone home, and err, let's just say Sony's reputation from the whole root kit thing).
But now I've got another problem - that Matsushita/Panasonic are involved.
Here's why:
I have the misfortune of a MATSHITA UJ-811 DVD drive in my notebook. After moving continents with a bunch of DVDs. I ran into a region code problem.After googling around a lot, I found that:
"MMC standard requires, that a drive should not reveal a title key on a region mismatched CSS protected disc. (It should return "Illegal request - region code does not match"). Some drives are even less restrictive and even give you the title key on region mismatch.
But AnyDVD can usually reveal the title key with a brute force attack, as long as the drive allows you to read the scrambled sectors.
Matsushita (Panasonic) drives do not! You CANNOT read the scrambled data, if the region code doesn't match.
No other drive behaves this way, only Matsushita (Panasonic) drives do, as the standard does not require a drive to not reveal the protected data on region mismatch, but Matsushita (Panasonic) drives are more restrictive as they need to be. "
You can imagine I was pissed and so Matsushita and Panasonic are now on my 'do not buy' list.
If they're involved with Blu-Ray stuff, you can bet they will take it up the ass from Sony...
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
...just a 20% increase in the amount of BluRay discs that will be silkscreened "Memorex" !! (Where did you think "binned" discs go?)
Save them, and in a few years when you're found guilty of price fixing, send them all to libraries as part of the settlement.
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...designer coasters...
Didn't anybody notice that they are producing ROM, i.e. factory mastered disks?
Oh? Why not? The cost of producing a pentium chip, (exlcuding R&D writeoff and Yield factorization) is very similar to producing any other chip at the most about $10. But they sell for up to $1000. The ones that sell for $1000 are the ones that come from the 10% yield line, at $10 per chip (bad or good) produced, and a 10% yield, you still get to write off about $900 on R&D for that chip.....
don't much care about their yields. sony is dead to me, their draconian copyright protection bullsh*t shouldn't be supported. and who cares about ps3...dvd didn't take off because of ps2. it took off because of ultra cheap dvd players.
Oh? Why not?
Comparing Pentiums and CD manufacturing are, I think, comparing apples and oranges. Intel both owns the manufacturing plant and sells the chip.
Most - if not all - large record companies contract out the production of CDs. The income of a CD manufacturing company is based on the price agreed in their contract with the record company, not by the pricetag on the CD when the record company sells it to Amazon. And a CD manufacturing company probably can't raise their price much to cover the added expense of tuning a new production line because other companies will then be cheaper and they'll lose the contract. So yeah, they can lose money by pressing CDs at $0.125[1] instead of at $0.1 even if the retail price in the shop is $20.
[1] I do not have inside information on what the real costs are, but you get the idea. The manufacture company and the company making money on selling the product are not the same. Same deal with lots of tech products manufactured in Asia, clothes made in 3rd world sweatshops, etc.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
For CDs there is a load of competition to make the CDs at $0.10 a piece. As you note, if you pay $20 in the shop, most of it is for the content. Someone selling content can probably charge $40 for 50Gb worth of higher-res content instead of the older $20. If the production costs for that 50Gb DVD is $1.00 higher (a tenfold increase) then that will still be a good deal.