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Hardware Pioneer, Mitsubishi Developer Cost-effective Blu-ray Disc Recordables
Marcus Yam (Blog) - September 19, 2007 9:09 AM

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43 comment(s) - last by Oregonian2.. on Sep 21 at 1:42 PM

(Source: CDRInfo)

New technology could make Blu-ray Disc recordable media more affordable

If maximum storage capacity is demanded of physical optical media, Blu-ray Disc is currently top in that department. Of course, the high costs of Blu-ray Disc media production make the format much less accessible than DVD-R, even after the consideration of capacity.

Pioneer and Mitsubishi Chemical Media are hoping to change that with the development of a lower-cost variation of recordable Blu-ray Disc. The two companies announced that by using an organic dye recording layer, disc manufacturing costs would be significantly reduced.

According to CDRInfo, the technology used in the lower-cost version is called LTH for "Low to High" recording, which is included in the Blu-ray Disc Recordable Format 1.2 specifications.

The true savings of this new recordable Blu-ray Disc come from the manufacturing process, which does not require large-scale changes in production equipment. The LTH BD-R discs can be made using modified, but existing CD-R and DVD-R machinery.

Despite the cost benefits, one hurdle that the new recordable Blu-ray Disc must face is compatibility. Current Blu-ray Disc drives and standalone players are unable to read the LTH media, though it may be possible to change that through a firmware updated. Pioneer may also release new hardware that will ship with LTH BD-R compatibility.

Pioneer and Mitsubishi demonstrated a 25GB single-layer disc that can be burned at up to 2x speed. LTH BD-R drives and media could appear as early as spring 2008.

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Storage!

By Screwuhippie on 9/19/2007 10:23:44 AM , Rating: 5

I still prefer my 3.5in floppy disks! Nothing says sexy like a stack of 1000 floppies to impress the ladies.

Who needs Blu-Ray ... well ... er ... nevermind

RE: Storage!

By Master Kenobi

(blog) on 9/19/2007 10:41:11 AM , Rating: 2

With hard disk space so cheap currently they are hard pressed to make the case for optical storage. Waiting on Holographic Disks to roll in and end this "Best Storage Option" debate.

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RE: Storage!

By Carl B on 9/19/2007 10:47:15 AM , Rating: 5

Optical media serves the role now it always has: portability and archiving. A hard drive can't - in a practical fashion - serve in those capacities. Not to mention, you can't put a movie or album on a hard drive and get it playing on a CE device.

Have you stopped using writable DVDs due to the presence of larger HDDs alone? I know I haven't.

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RE: Storage!

By Master Kenobi

(blog) on 9/19/2007 11:12:40 AM , Rating: 3

I haven't burned a Data DVD in a while. I have made copies of movies but thats all. For data storage and archival I use an external NAS box in a 1TB Raid 1 capacity.

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RE: Storage!

By Master Kenobi

(blog) on 9/19/2007 11:27:15 AM , Rating: 2

For transport my 8GB USB thumb drive is sufficient. Cheap too.

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RE: Storage!

By drank12quartsstrohsbeer on 9/19/2007 11:51:28 AM , Rating: 3

The importance of the data is a factor in choosing a backup method.

I believe paper holds the record for longest shelf life. :)

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RE: Storage!

By lumbergeek on 9/19/2007 12:59:23 PM , Rating: 2

Not so! Sheep-skin vellum still holds the record.

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RE: Storage!

By Oregonian2 on 9/19/2007 2:18:15 PM , Rating: 2

Not carving or painting on rock walls in caves or crypts?

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RE: Storage!

By BladeVenom on 9/19/2007 4:44:38 PM , Rating: 3

Caves suffer from some portability problems.

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RE: Storage!

By NickWV on 9/20/2007 3:58:36 AM , Rating: 2

rofl, yeah I would believe so.

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RE: Storage!

By Carl B on 9/19/2007 12:36:46 PM , Rating: 2

Well, I've had so many drive re-writes asociated with mobo upgrades that any update now is accompanied by a massive archiving. Not to mention, failing hard drives have been manageable situations for me due to optical. I'm not saying everyone needs it... but I do! ;)

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RE: Storage!

By timmiser on 9/19/2007 2:10:42 PM , Rating: 2

I have a hi-def camcorder that I would prefer to burn my home movies onto HD media. My only option right now is to burn HD-DVD content onto a double layer DVD disc that can play in HD-DVD players. That gives me about 40 Minutes of HD video per disc.

Especially with the abundant HD camercorders available nowadays, I believe there is a growing need to have a burnable HD opitical format and this could be a great solution.

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RE: Storage!

By deeznuts on 9/19/2007 5:23:59 PM , Rating: 2

Archiving. SEC for example requires RIA's that use electronic storage to archive data, on hard non-rewritable media.

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RE: Storage!

By acer905 on 9/19/2007 10:43:30 AM , Rating: 2

Dude... 1000 floppies...thats like... over a gigabyte... you are haulin now.

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RE: Storage!

By Screwuhippie on 9/19/2007 10:49:02 AM , Rating: 2

You betcha! Anything and everything I can do to help keep plastic out of landfills i'm all for! Chicks dig the 3.5'ers over the 5.25 floppies ... they like em harder :)

Now ... if I can just get my hands on 1,000,000 3.5 inch drives and 1,000,000 disks ... and run them all in serial ... imagine the things I could accomplish ...

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RE: Storage!

By jak3676 on 9/19/2007 11:07:06 AM , Rating: 2

Bah, I just think your jealous of my 8" drive

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RE: Storage!

By Screwuhippie on 9/19/2007 11:45:43 AM , Rating: 2

Are you claiming to be the Ron Jeremy of removable media?

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RE: Storage!

By Oregonian2 on 9/19/2007 2:16:22 PM , Rating: 2

I've got an 8" hard sectored one in my garage!

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RE: Storage!

By timmiser on 9/19/2007 2:13:01 PM , Rating: 2

Whatever, my ladies prefer the Quantum bigfoot 5.25 hard drive. That way you keep the hardness and gain the extra size cuz size does matter!

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RE: Storage!

By Vanilla Thunder on 9/19/2007 10:47:24 AM , Rating: 2

Nothing says sexy like my stack of C64 casettes. Oh yeah...

Vanilla

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RE: Storage!

By dudde on 9/19/2007 12:07:12 PM , Rating: 2

Nothing beats old school PUNCH CARDS!

We still hear reactions from a lot of people like, "Thats cute, what is that for?"

Our I.T. stock room still has several boxes of punch cards.

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RE: Storage!

By Screwuhippie on 9/19/2007 12:20:48 PM , Rating: 2

My vacuum tube says your punch card smells funny :)

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RE: Storage!

By Oregonian2 on 9/19/2007 2:20:24 PM , Rating: 2

Yeah, I finally dumped my Mohawk card reader from my garage when I moved about ten years ago. :-) Kept some cards for old time's sake.

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RE: Storage!

By wordsworm on 9/19/2007 8:28:54 PM , Rating: 2

Punch cards will be in use long after Blu-ray has been retired. The reason is that small companies will always use them to monitor employees' hours.

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RE: Storage!

By erikejw on 9/21/2007 12:57:27 PM , Rating: 2

Punch cards is rocket science compared to these relics.
Time to get nostalgic.

First computer that could store a program
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Small-Scal...
English

First computer altogether
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)
German

Anyone who miss Eniac in this is missing that the winner of a war always write the history.

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RE: Storage!

By grampaw on 9/19/2007 11:43:16 AM , Rating: 2

I like my 5.25 floppies - but then most people on this forum were probably in diapers when they were the going thing...

Actually, I fail to see how the whole Blu-ray data recording thing is even remotely cost-effective. I don't know anybody that even uses data DVD+R anymore. 8 Gig flash drives and huge capacity cheap hard drives have completely obviated any need for Blu-ray data disks.

I suppose you could "backup" your Blu-ray movies, however, besides being possibly illegal, it's apparently still cheaper to just buy two copies.

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RE: Storage!

By lumbergeek on 9/19/2007 1:00:43 PM , Rating: 2

I do. Data DVD+R that is. Sufficient for my uses.

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RE: Storage!

By timmiser on 9/19/2007 2:24:08 PM , Rating: 2

Heck, I remember when any data recording was a luxury. When the tape drive came along, that was the coolest thing ever. You could actually load and save data onto audio cassette tapes and it would only take about 30 minutes for a program to load or save onto the tape.

When the first floppy drive came along, it cost me $350! I couldn't tell you the size in KBs cuz in those days the space was denominated in "blocks". But what made it worth the $350 is that the same data that took 30 minutes to load or save on the cassette, now only took about 3 minutes! That was way cool!

The next coolest thing is when we figured out that with a hole punch you could clip the side of the single sided floppy, and then we could acutally flip the disk over and use the other side of the disk for more storage space!

How cool was that?!

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RE: Storage!

By murray13 on 9/19/2007 8:29:23 PM , Rating: 2

It was 150k. And at the time, that was huge!

I had over 2000 disks all of them using the dbl side trick.

Today you could fit all of that on a $10 USB drive with room to spare!

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Life Expectancy

By Egglick on 9/19/2007 10:59:51 AM , Rating: 2

You've got to wonder how long an "organic dye" will last before developing read errors.

RE: Life Expectancy

By Screwuhippie on 9/19/2007 11:01:39 AM , Rating: 2

If you use Nanowires you can go 100,000 years :)

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RE: Life Expectancy

By Master Kenobi

(blog) on 9/19/2007 11:13:41 AM , Rating: 2

Nanowires aren't cheap.

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RE: Life Expectancy

By Oregonian2 on 9/21/2007 1:38:35 PM , Rating: 2

Do we know this to be true? How was it tested?

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RE: Life Expectancy

By Ian@CDRlabs on 9/19/2007 11:56:13 AM , Rating: 2

Probably just as long as CD's and DVD's since they use organic dye too.

Hmmm.. that cdrinfo article is very similiar to one written by AV Watch. It looks like they just translated it to English.

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20070918/bd...

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RE: Life Expectancy

By Carl B on 9/19/2007 12:29:39 PM , Rating: 2

Well, that would make sense, since one would imagine that AV/Watch would more readily have their finger on the pulse of A/V news (non press released) coming out of Japan.

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floppy RAID

By kyleb2112 on 9/19/2007 4:17:23 PM , Rating: 2

Who needs Blue Ray now we've got floppy RAID:
http://phoenix.cc.edu/MegaFloppy.htm

RE: floppy RAID

By GlassHouse69 on 9/19/2007 9:40:09 PM , Rating: 2

that's hot

It really picked up a hell of a lot of speed :)

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Let me get this straight.

By retrospooty on 9/19/2007 10:49:17 AM , Rating: 3

Soon we may have more affordable media to go along with our $600+ Blue ray recorders? Whats even the point? I'll be sticking with my eSata/USB2 enclosure for a long time.

Remember CD/DVD burners

By ruibing on 9/19/2007 11:16:02 AM , Rating: 1

CD and DVD burners were just as expensive when they first came out. The technology will become mainstream and it will get cheaper.

RE: Remember CD/DVD burners

By Oregonian2 on 9/19/2007 2:26:00 PM , Rating: 2

Could be, but the media cost is the trick. DL regular DVDs have taken a REALLY long time for their price to drop, they've only just recently started to finally drop in price down to reasonable levels (1~2 dollars each for halfway decent disks). My DVD recorder only uses SL disks but it hasn't mattered until now. :-)

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BDC-2202

By Kuroyama on 9/19/2007 11:00:20 AM , Rating: 2

Just got one of those "cheap" $299 Pioneer BDC-2202 Blu-Ray drives for my HTPC. Hope that Pioneer makes sure I can read these new discs if they end up becoming commonplace. Then again, by that time I'll probably have replaced my drive with a Blu-Ray burner (or HD-DVD or whatever's the norm by then).

Deja Vu HD format?

By Oregonian2 on 9/21/2007 1:42:06 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
The LTH BD-R discs can be made using modified, but existing CD-R and DVD-R machinery.

Sounds like a page out of the HD format book! :-)

Is this up-down whatever format just a hidden HD format within the Blu-ray spec left over from when they were negotiating a common format?

One problem

By FITCamaro on 9/19/2007 3:43:37 PM , Rating: 1

Not all Blu-ray players have network ports. So updating the firmware will be impossible short of shipping it somewhere to have it done.

And this does nothing to drive down the cost of the actual player. Which is probably more important to consumers now than the cost of media. They have to get the player before they'll care about the cost of discs.