Pioneer Develops 400GB Blu-Ray Disc

It’s been a long road for Blu-Ray. But now that the format war and the need for a completive edge is long over, one might have guessed the members of the Blu-ray Disc Association would have given up on creating a means for higher capacity discs. It looks like we were wrong.

Today, Pioneer put out a press release touting their newest and greatest achievement in optical media yet. Their “wide-range spherical aberration compensator and light-receiving element” enabled them to produce a 16-layer read-only Blu-Ray disc, complete with the standard 25GB capacity per layer. Naturally, while this technology is only available for testing purposes for the time being, we will undoubtedly see a similar solution headed for retail when the technology is more mature.

Pioneer plans to release more details at the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage on July 13.

July 7, 2008, Tokyo, Japan – Pioneer Corporation has succeeded in developing a 16-layer read-only optical disc with a capacity of 400 gigabytes for the first time in the world*1. Its per-layer capacity is 25 gigabytes, which is the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc (BD). This multilayer technology will also be applicable to multilayer recordable discs. This development has bolstered Pioneer’s confidence in the feasibility of a large-capacity optical disc, which is expected to become necessary in the near future.