Blu-Ray is Coming
 

Sony and numerous other companies are developing a new high-capacity optical disk, that can be used for video recording. It uses a blue-violet laser and a narrow track pitch of .32µm, half the width of DVD. It has a bit-rate of 36Mbps and holds 27Gb on a single-layer, CD-size disk and 50Gb on a two-layer disk. With the dual-layer, it could hold 4 hours of MPEG-2 High Definition video and 26 hours of VHS-quality. It would also hold 4 hours of DV video, uncompressed other than to its own 5 to 1 CoDec. No need to mention the advantages that optical disks have, especially for long-term storage, over magnetic harddrives-----and it could be a lot cheaper, being interchangeable and all.

This blue-light laser system is something that has been a subject of speculation for many years, but it appears that the companies intend to implement it for video, including camcorders, in the next few years. I assume they will work hard to iron out the reliability bugs that have accompanied portable optical disk recorders. The 4-hour recording time sounds a lot better than the 20-min. time of some current disk camcorders. You can read more on the Press Release section of the Sony/Japan website. Be sure to push the English button, if you have no facility in that language. There's probably a lot more on this topic out there, if anyone wanted to hunt for it. Some of you may have tuned into this earlier, but there are undoubtedly many who haven't heard of it before.

So, is there a Foveon X3/Blu-Ray Supercam in our future?

Sony already had a demo model (recorder/player) and a blue-ray
disc working on a convention in japan (if I recall correctly). They
had 6 films on there. I do hope they pick ONE standard though
(like they did with DVD). And I truly hope it will be backwards
compatible with DVD (I don't want to re-buy my 200+ DVD
collection, thank you very much).

Other than that it is nice news!

I suspect we'll always have more than one format. DVD will replace VHS in the entertainment field and eventually some disk based medium will be used for aquisition. But I don't think we'll ever have just one format in the near future. Maybe when solid state advances enough. How about a compact flash card that holds 27 gigs of data? Fill up a card, just pop in another. Get back to the office and it fits in a card reader. No worries about dust, scratches, melting or dropping the disk. Lexar has 1GB cards that are 24X (3.6MB/sec). That's fast enough for mini DV. If they got one more speed increase (30X) and doubled or tripled the capacity, broadcast news would be all over them.

Jeff

Blu-Ray discs will probably be leapfrogged before they supplant the enormously popular DVD standard. One thing that isn't publicized about Blu-Ray is that the discs are very susceptible to dust, scratches, fingerprints, etc., so you can't just use them as beverage coasters and frisbees like you would your CDs and DVDs and still expect them to work. They can't be stored and handled bare; they will all require a little plastic cartridge. (Reminds me of the early days of CD-ROM drives when most drives had a little plastic chassis you had to put your disc in.) If you step on one, you're probably out of luck!

Robert:
You know I'd happily welcome the standard of an enclosure around the disc. Who wouldn't want that extra protection of their master? That's why I love minidisks, they have a neat enclosure and you don't really have to worry about the case. Anything that the manufacturers can do to make the medium stable and protected should be pursued.

As for the case of stepping on one, hopefully you could take out the disc and put it into another enclosure and save any data off it.

My 2 cents.

Flash
 

Re: How about a compact flash card that holds 27 gigs of data?

The technology is there, and Intel in specific has several FAB's in it's portfolio to complete such tasks. Other wafer manufacturers also have foundrys/FAB's (other than Intel) that could be "tooled" for the task. One bad thing about FLASH technology is that the die yields are currently very low when compared to other devices.

The only problem now, is getting the user market built up enough to actually produce a low cost item of this function (e.g. 27gig), and not screw the HD makers in the process(and of course raising the yeild factor).

Somewhat trivial type info, but I thought I would throw it out there.

You could fit 2.45 hours of DV on such a CF card. Throw your tape carriages away!

The true problem is speed, not size for the immediate future. But it is fast enough for DV. I don't think Intel is too worried about HD makers. It was about 3 years ago that 64mb CF cards were around $200 or more. Now they are what $20 to $30 dollars? It's only a matter of time.

Jeff

As I understand it blue laser will be strictly high end for the next (first) five years. After that we can begin to look forward to have it introduced in our homes. One of the blue laser target markets right now is d-cinema. Combined with the Kodak/JVC projectors it might be the standard for future d-cinema solutions...