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Hardware TDK Ships Blu-ray Media
Sven Olsen (Blog) - April 10, 2006 6:35 PM

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18 comment(s) - last by Blackraven.. on Apr 12 at 11:54 AM

TDK beats all others to the finish line in shipping Blu-ray media

TDK Corporation announced today that it has begun shipping Blu-ray recordable media to retailers across the United States. The first wave of media will include 25GB BD-R (recordable) and BD-RE (rewritable) media.

This media is single-layered 25GB capacity. TDK plans to ship dual layer media at 25GB per layer later this year as Blu-ray drives and set top recorders start becoming available. According to the press release, TDK's Blu-ray discs are manufactured at its Chikumagawa Techno Factory in Japan. The manufacturing process is much very different compared to that of CDs and DVDs. TDK claims:

The high-sensitivity inorganic recording material utilized by TDK for the write-once type BD-R is completely different than the recording materials used for CD or DVD. TDK Blu-ray Discs’ inorganic material is impervious to light, making the discs exceptionally well suited for archiving data. Composed of copper and silicon, TDK’s exclusive CuSi recording material delivers remarkable, long-lasting performance. The recording material enables fast recording and playback speeds and also makes it possible to realize massive capacities through multi-layering.

Additionally, TDK has included its hard coating formulation called DURABIS for added protection to the media. Pricing on the media has also been released for the BD-R and BD-RE at $19.99 and $24.99 respectively. Later this year, TDK will ship the 50GB media at $47.99 for the BD-R media and $59.99 for the BD-RE media.

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$20 per disc !

By CuriousMike on 4/10/2006 7:26:11 PM , Rating: 2

Yeah, maybe I'll wait a year until Frys has them for $8.99 for 25 discs...

RE: $20 per disc !

By GimpyFuzznut on 4/10/2006 7:29:35 PM , Rating: 2

Keep waiting then. Bloody DVD dual layer discs are around $30 for THREE damn discs at most places.

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RE: $20 per disc !

By MykC on 4/10/2006 8:28:56 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
Keep waiting then. Bloody DVD dual layer discs are around $30 for THREE damn discs at most places.

You should look around a bit more. I can buy DVD-R DL for ~$2.20/disc CAN a disc for the RiData, Verbatims ~5.66/disc CAN

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RE: $20 per disc !

By FearaFox on 4/10/2006 11:02:22 PM , Rating: 2

still only ~50c cdn per single layered disc.

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RE: $20 per disc !

By wileec on 4/11/2006 11:07:04 AM , Rating: 2

Best Buy in my area usually has Verbatim DVD dual-layer for $30 for 10 discs. $3 a disc. Is this really too much? I still buy VHS tapes that cost more than that. I want quality media that lasts, and I'll definitely pay more to get it. Most people may just copy DVD's and stuff, but I use it to store family photos and personal documents. I need the media to last for a few years in storage. Cheap media doesn't cut it. I already had some CD-R's go bad on me after one year in storage in my closet.

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RE: $20 per disc !

By TheGee on 4/11/2006 11:48:06 AM , Rating: 2

If you want to archive invest the extra bucks in DVD-RAM it's the only one that lasts at the moment (unless you can afford magneto optical type thingies!)A lot of the latest DVD recorders will be able to handle it. I allways advise everybody to use it over other formats especially for precious things like photos etc. Ive not had a RAM disc fail yet.

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RE: $20 per disc !

By BigToque on 4/10/2006 7:42:58 PM , Rating: 2

It's always expensive to be an early adopter.

Some people have an actual use for this technology, so it's an easy purchase to justify.

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RE: $20 per disc !

By segagenesis on 4/10/2006 7:48:02 PM , Rating: 3

So easily we forget the days of 1x CD-R drives costing $3000 and media at $40 a piece. Repeat for the first DVD-R drives. Did you really expect new media to be free?

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$1/GB!!

By Danthemanz123 on 4/10/2006 7:59:07 PM , Rating: 2

I understand that media like this is ALWAYS very pricey at first, but $1/GB, we passed that in HDD's years ago....
Long live the cheap HD-DVD's....

RE: $1/GB!!

By hwhacker on 4/10/2006 8:21:20 PM , Rating: 2

Well, there's that...and the storage space ratio to that of solid-state media. 25/50gb is going to hold it's weight for quite some time, unlike 700mb and 4.7gb...In which using multiple disks for something like decent quality on a movie (vcd/svcd) or a harddrive back-up was something needed, un-so with this...unless you either need to back-up your ps3 game/need something in HD...Or have a massive amount of pr0n you just cannot lose.

They will use this to abuse the pricing...although...

$60 (meaning $40-50 in reality) for 50gb of rewritable, easily transportable media is actually pretty damn nifty...If it actually doesn't degrate to costers quickly like most cd and dvd's do...and read/write is actually livable.

With inevitable competition the prices will drop to reasonable-use levels quickly, but I seriously doubt to anywhere near the levels we're used to with cd's and DVD's...At least not for QUITE some time...When HD is prevalent, HDD's are at a much higher ratio, etc.

Still...I suppose a $10 copy of DMC4 is better than a $60 copy, eh?

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RE: $1/GB!!

By Visual on 4/11/2006 12:02:20 AM , Rating: 1

I'm a blu-ray "fan" you might say. I can't wait to have my drive already. And indeed the main reason I like it is not what it'd do for HD movies, but for computer storage.

Believe it or not, DL DVDs are still near impossible to find where I live, and the prices are ridiculous. And those are write-once discs, I'm not even sure if there'd be a RW DL disc ever.

The HD-DVD standard was quite funny to keep track on as it evolved - their printed, R and RW discs each use completely separate specs, resulting in a mess that just screams "oversight" or "patch-up job" - attempting to increase capacity so as to counter BD's advantage, their RW format will be 20GB singlelayer and they're still working on duallayer which will have a 32GB capacity, their R format is still 15gb and will ONLY be singlelayer with the current spec (but the R specs are the oldest of the three so there are hopes for an update here) and for their printed media they came up with the genious "solution" of having dual-sided DL discs in order to fight BD (and for a while even advertised some dual-sided "hybrid" discs :/) Then they came to their senses and tried increasing layers on a single side, but the max that was possible was three layers, and those went deeper than the middle of the disc so dualsided became impossible... anyway, how do you fancy a format with 15/30/45GB printed media, only 15gb R media and 20/32GB RW media? Well ok, I agree, those numbers could've been even more random-looking, so it's not all bad. Just hope there don't turn out to be tons of incompatibilities with the RW discs and cheap players.

RW discs from the get-go instead of a "strapon" to the specs is just one of the reasons I'm all for Blu-ray here. And I really like the initial pricing, I must add, atleast for RW discs.

OFFTOPIC/to the site admins: For heaven's sake, fix your site at last, please. I'm sick of "Oops!"es every time I try anything after a brief interval of inactivity.

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RE: $1/GB!!

By Spoonbender on 4/11/2006 5:00:09 AM , Rating: 2

Well, some of us just use harddrives for computer storage. Cheaper, faster, more reliable and takes up less space. ;)

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RE: $1/GB!!

By IsDanReally on 4/11/2006 10:18:54 AM , Rating: 2

Hard drives being more reliable is questionable. My most recent set of large hard drives have all three failed within a year. Luckily, with RAID what you say is correct.

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RE: $1/GB!!

By Visual on 4/11/2006 11:16:04 AM , Rating: 2

harddrives arent compact and portable enough. i thought it was pretty clear removable storage is what i had in mind.
and no, they aren't cheaper too - a 20gb harddisk these days will cost you probably more than $40 :p they do get cheap in the bulk capacities ofcourse, but im pretty sure by the time BD gets to 4 or 8 layers, the format will be serious competition to HDDs... prices will fall. oh and eventually it will be faster than HDDs for sure - tricks like reading all layers at once, kinda raid stripping with layers instead of separate drives :p still only needs one optical head too.

as to the reliability - only time will show, we'll have to wait and see. hddvd certainly doesn't offer much progress above dvds, but i do have high expectations of tdk's BD coating (fanboyinsh again, i know).

oh and what do you mean "takes up less space" ? doesn't seem so to me

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I hate it

By Missing Ghost on 4/11/2006 8:12:44 PM , Rating: 2

I hope blu-ray and hd-dvd die fast and get forgotten.

Hurray for TDK

By Blackraven on 4/12/2006 11:54:25 AM , Rating: 2

Both formats seem good, but in a technological aspect, Blu-ray is indeed better and this news about TDK releasing final spec Blu-ray discs is already proving the R&D and new tech involved.

This should surely spice up the competition.

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Drives

By deeznuts on 4/11/2006 1:03:07 PM , Rating: 2

What is the timeline for pc drives to come out? I'm not interested in set tops. And prices for movies are listed at deepdiscountdvd, the prices don't look too bad for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD.