Sony's not one to rest on its laurels. Blu-ray has been on the market for a couple of years, and although it's in this stagnant economy it needs to get us all on to the next consumer electronics device.So, today the Japanese giant has announced exclusively to CNET UK its new format - microBD.
The discs are very similar in structure to Blu-ray discs, but they are the same size as the company's UMD gaming format. Like both Blu-ray and UMD, the microBD discs are multi-layered. The new format also uses the same ISO structure as Blu-ray, which should simplify the mastering process for microBD movies.
microBD discs are read by a 375nm laser, which is slightly shorter in wavelength than the 405nm laser in Blu-ray players. This new laser assembly means that quite substantial amounts of data can be written to a disc that's considerably smaller than a Blu-ray. In fact, although the discs are less than half the physical size of Blu-ray media, they can hold up to 75GB of data on two layers. A theoretically possible, but untested, third layer could take capacity to 100GB.
Read full post on Cnet here...