TDK Readies Blu-ray Disc Production (PC World story)

[willrob]

TDK Readies Blu-ray Disc Production

Blu-ray supporter has begun producing samples of recordable, rewritable media.

Martyn Williams, IDG News Service
Tuesday, December 13, 2005

TDK has begun producing samples of recordable and rewritable Blu-ray Disc bare media for consumer use, the company says.

Until now, commercial Blu-ray Disc media has come in a protective cartridge but the Blu-ray Disc Association is finalizing a specification for bare discs. In anticipation of this, TDK has begun test manufacturing such discs on a line at its plant in Chikumagawa in Japan's Nagano prefecture.

The discs make use of a TDK-developed hard protective coating. This coating minimizes scratches to their surface and allows the use of discs without cartridges.

Disc Details

TDK is planning to begin production of four types of discs just as soon as the Blu-ray Disc Association issues licenses for the format, said Nobuyuki Koike, a spokesperson for TDK in Tokyo. The company has been expecting such approval for a while but it hasn't come yet, he said. TDK now expects the group to approve the format sometime next year.

The discs will be 25GB and 50GB versions of recordable BD-R and rewritable BD-RW media, TDK representatives said. The company has yet to price the discs but expects they'll be cheaper than existing media because they don't require the cartridge. TDK has also developed a prototype of a 100GB Blu-ray disc.

The new discs will be for use in Blu-ray Disc recorders. At present, only a handful of such models are available from companies such as Sony, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), and Sharp.

The Blu-ray Disc Association and companies backing the format are expected to unveil new products and a commercialization schedule for read-only BD-ROM disc media at the Consumer Electronics Show, which open in Las Vegas on January 5, 2006.

[terryj]

100GB disc....imagine the studios filling that up with
craptacular extras...they could:

1. Put both WS and FS versions with 6 channel, 2 channel Dolby, and 2 channel DTS
2. Spanish, French and Cantonese Language Tracks
3. Makings of
4. Bloopers
5. Deleted scenes
6. casting calls
7. script readings
8. dress fittings
9. special effects looks
11. makeup looks
12. soundtrack sessions
13. trailers/teasers of the movie
14. traielrs/teasers of the whole enite year's PRODUCTION slate
15. a complete 5 levels of video game play

sorry for going OT...it just boggles the mind.

but I'd settle for just having 25GB right now, and the ability
to MULTI-SESSION burn a DVD-R volume like you
can currently with CD-R. One session for authored dvd,
one session for PC/Mac, that would only be accessible
via a PC/Mac.

[willrob]

I have no experience with HD, but I suspect a two hour HD movie might take up a lot of real estate. So a 25G blue ray disk might simply hold a HD version of today's DVDs.

[terryj]

in that theorem, HD to 25GB, with 0 extras, yes.
But in a 100GB disc, you could have both
FS and WS in HD on the same disc, and still have room
to squeeze crap in SD, which I was referring to in my above post.

In any event, it should make the next 5 years interesting.....

[edDV]

Not so fast, HD DVD MPeg2 1080p uses 25 Mb/s (similar to the video portion of DV format) or ~12GB per hour. 100GB goes by fast at that rate 8.3 Hours or ~ only 11 episodes of LOST. That is less than a typical 13 episode prime time season.

For this reason, episodic DVDs are likely to use the alternate VC-1 or H.264 formats for datatarates in the 8-12 Mb/s range or 16-25 hours.