Blu-Ray Technology

More and more people are getting interested by the High Definition technology but Blu-ray burners are still too expensive for some customers.

That’s why Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. will release its BDC-2202 in North America in June. Pioneer not only offers just a Blu-ray reader for those who don’t want to store massively but also a Dvd and Cd burning solution at a retail price of $299.

The details surrounding LG’s promised combination high-definition DVD player came into focus on Sunday.

The Korean electronics maker unveiled the Super Multi Blue, the first player that can play discs from the competing Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD formats, at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

“Customers are not really sure which format player they want to buy and naturally seem reluctant to buy the player or DVD contents,” said LG North America president and chief executive Michael Ahn. He also cited the lagging sales of both disc formats and the respective players as motivation to engineer a dual-format player, saying the next-generation video disc industry growth “is slower than it could be”…

Pioneer has announced its 8th generation of plasmas in Europe, with six 720p sets available in June in 42- and 50-inch sizes, and four 1080p sets in 50- and 60-inch flavors coming in September. All models have integrated DVB-T tuners and detachable speakers, with the 720p sets sporting a 16,000:1 contrast ratio, and the 1080p sets stepping it up to a whopping 20,000:1…

Sony is ramping up blue laser diode capacity for its Blu-ray players much faster than we anticipated, and the costs are coming down. A price drop on the PS3 this year is starting to seem more and more likely. Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter tells GameDaily BIZ that PS3 could cost 100 dollars less by mid-year.

The Blu-ray drive in the PlayStation 3 has been a source of much contention among industry observers. The inclusion of Blu-ray in the PS3 is one of the main reasons the console is being sold for $600. But as with any product, economies of scale should help to eventually bring costs down.

With Blu-ray, however, it could be coming faster than we think. Sony’s Sony Shiroishi Semiconductor Inc. subsidiary recently announced that as of April they established an industry-leading monthly production capacity of 1.7 million blue-violet laser diodes. Moreover, Shiroishi “has already made preparations to further reinforce production capacity based on future demand.” Sony would probably claim that they’re easily winning the next-gen movie format war, with Blu-ray outselling HD DVD more than 2 to 1, and the company believes that demand for Blu-ray will only increase, whether through PS3 adoption or standalone Blu-ray players…

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Hitachi showcased playback of a four-layer Blu-Ray disc featuring a capacity of 25GB per layer. The company said that the drive used for reading was a standard Blu-Ray drive, at its booth at the 2007 International CES.

There have been other academic reports of creating fourlayer (100GB) or even six layer (200GB) disc media by TDK. Some companies have also showcased playback of multi-layer BD media using test players embedded with a special optical head. But in the current demonstation, Hitachi used a ‘standard drive’.

“This is the first demonstration of quadruple disc readout using a player based on an optical head generally used in current BD drives on the market,” said Hitachi representatives.

Hitachi used an optical disc drive based on the “GBW-H10N” supporting 4x speed BD recording, which Hitachi-LG Data Storage, Inc. announced in July 2006. However, the company made some alterations to the firmware and the optical system inside the head, to make the player compatible with four-layer BD playback. Frontend signal processing (Renesas) and other circuits are the same as those used in the “GBW-H10N.”

Of course, the demonstration did not include playback of video. Hitachi set up a reference system that included a PC, the BD drive connected to an oscilator, tuned to display the HF reading signal and especially the javascript:void(0)
Publishdata patterns of the disc, which indicate the BD recording marks. According to a report on the Japanese Tech-On website, the first layer (L0) of the 100GB disc included a series of 3T patterns followed by 4T patterns marked on a layer one (L1) above it, 5T patterns on L2 and 6T patterns on L3. When the player picked up signals from each layer on this disc, it displays the signals’ waveforms using the oscilloscope. The frequencies changed depending on the layer being read, so demonstration observers could recognize the readout of each layer. However, the drive was not set to pick up the 2T patterns, which are the smallest found on data Blu-Ray discs (3T to 11T for the data features on DVD).

Hitachi said, that developing this technology required a drive capable of detecting which layer to read. The company has not specified how the pickup lens actually detects the readout layer, but reportedly explored a wide variety of methods including a very basic way, in which the pickup lens finds a targeted layer by scanning each layer in order of shorter distance from the optical head.

Quadruple BD capacity could be used for storing Digital Cinema Picture Quality content in the future. For example, a 100GB disc could hold 3.5h hours of 64Mbps video (resolution 4K-2K).