March 03, 2003
Faster. Bigger. Sooner
PC World reports that Sony have announced a video recorder, based on Blu-Ray laser technology.
The storage capacity is enormous - a disc can store 23Gb of data in MPEG-2
format, which is two hours of high-definition TV, 16 hours of analogue TV
broadcasts or about as much pornography as is humanly possible for a teenager
to accumulate.
I've just about got up to speed with CD-Rs, and existing
DVD-Rs are still pretty thin on the ground. When are we going to get time to
look at all this stuff that we are storing?
Blu-ray uses a blue laser to record data on discs, while CD and DVD systems use red lasers. Blue lasers have a shorter wavelength--405 nanometers compared to around 650 nanometers on DVD systems--and that means the laser beam can be focused onto a smaller area of the disc surface. In turn, this means less area is needed to store one bit of data and so more data can be stored on a disc.
Posted by Monasette at March 3, 2003 06:55 PM