Man I could finally clean up my external drive!!!! Plus Just think of putting say 90 standard def dvds on one of these!

Whatever happened to the holographic disc technology we kept hearing about?

Thats AWESOME !!! WAY to go Pioneer

well, the hvd is still being tested, as for 90 movies, thats way to small,, you could get upward to 800 if you use the h264 format.

Well anything that can store whole TV-series in one disk is a good thing. I don't even know how many meters I have dvd's in my book shelf. A couple of these would take it all...

Yeah.. just wait til you accidentally scratch the disk or drop it and it shatters. 400GB goes bye bye.

Imagine having a write error or a burning a coaster...

I hope this catches on better and costs less than simple blank dual layer DVD discs did. Those still cost an arm and a leg despite being how old?

A. how much will it cost?

B. does this matter if adoptation of Blu-Ray continues to be so miniscule?

C. when they make 400GB blu-ray read/write disks, it will take a LONG to burn the full 400GB with current speeds. a 2x blu ray burner will write to a dual-layer disk in 90 minutes, a 1x burner would take 180. now imagine how slow writing 400GB would be, unless they develop 24x or faster blu ray burners very quickly.

I replaced all of my CD media with hard drives a long time ago. I don't think I'll drop the hard disk idea until SSDs become cheap and spacious. Never had a hard disk die on me - but I can't tell you how many times I've had to start over because of a damaged CD or DVD.

Hrm,

I don't like that optical tech is catching up to HDD tech in capacity. Seems to me that if a cheap renewable 400gig disc can be had for less than a HDD, we havea problem.

Cheers,

I think I've got this right... From what I can find, 1x on Blu-Ray = 36Mbps

36Mbps / 8 = 4.5MB/sec

409,600 / 4.5 = 91022.222 seconds (repeating)

which I believe means that at 1x this disc would take 1.05 days to write (25hrs)

Optical media is worthless nowadays. i refuse to buy a Blue ray drive. 1x? awesome...

a ridiculous price tag is emerging in the horizon.

$600 for a dvd anyone?

somebody has to say this - dang thats a lot of porn!!

Nobody really remembers the flourescing-dye based optical media?

Sure they made a blunder when they faked the demo on the showroom, but that didn't mean they lied. Now they are marketing the darn thing, only not for consumers though

Such a pity. The approach easily allowed hundreds of layers, meaning gigabytes and terabytes of data. It is also rewritable from the start, and practically scratch-proof (unless the scratch reaches and destroys the flourescing dyes).

*sigh*

Let just hope it has better crc checking than any other optical driver. Because if it isn't than one tiny tiny tiny..... litte dust will make few GB data unreadable.....

Cant use plastic as the medium to hold the dye. Have to use some sort of crystal to make it scratch proof.

I'd like to make a point- while its true the economy is crappy, I think one of the reasons why only a few stand alone BD players have sold versus the millions of PS3s is because those of us truly interested in the format are holding out for Profile 2.0. Once 2.0 players are within the 200 dollar price range, we will make those things fly off the shelves. This should then decrease the price even further, and the players will then shortly after become attractive to the mainstream consumer. I'm predicting that within three years, BD will have become more popular than DVDs.

Media is lagging WAY behind the burners. I am sure future burners will burn 16 layers, etc. But there is no media to burn. B-R has been out for years already and it's hard to find a 50GB anyplace ; a box of 25 - 25GB disks are @299 at Newegg !!.
@ anon
I don't think BD players will ever sell well. People already have a large collection of DVDs and don't want to replace the big collection with expensive BDs (if the old movies even exist on BD). Also, normal DVD players keep getting better as well. They now have upscale to HDMI and USB ports to play off external HDDs to view MP3,Divx, and H.264 files.
By the time BD players are FINALLY cheap enough and mature, like you said, people will be carrying 64+ gig flash drives in their pocket. Stores will love to sell movies by having customers download content to the flash drives & PMPs, then the stores don't need to keep an inventory of disks (then back up to the 4TB media player if the DRM is good enough).
Blu-Rays will end up like the Laser-Disk with only a short life. Some geeks will still use Blu-Rays to back up home HDDs.
Anything is possible, but I don't see Blu-Ray going anyplace until media, players, and movies start getting a whole lot cheaper VERY soon.
2 cents..

@anewmen
People that say BD's are not catching on very much, must not know much about Bluray. It has caught on and is selling faster then DVD at this time it their lifetime. Bluray is backward compatible with DVD. Players are not that expensive anymore. Yes they are obviously more then a DVD player, but in the last year or 2, Bluray players have dropped a very large amount in price. I remember when they were around 900+. You can now get them for under $300. As far as the movies themselves go, they are more expensive. I find retail stores charge to much for some movies, but if you look online, there are crazy deals. A lot of them are as much as a DVD or cheaper.

People that say Bluray is not catching on are just haters and are probably upset that HD-DVD died. Bluray gets better and better and I don't see it slowing down anytime soon.

I used BD instead of Blu-Ray for less typing (maybe a mistake). Of course I don't care if HD-DVD died. Since Blu-Ray is progressing SO slowly after a few years, I'm begining to stop caring about Blu-Ray as well. I hope there is big progress in Blu-Ray (like this article suggests). Then maybe I'll get interested again.

“Pioneer claims that the new 400 GB Blu-ray discs will be fully compatible with existing Blu-ray readers”

What about compatibility with existing writers?

@jacobus - no deal, you always need a writer that can handle multiple layers, just like dual-layer DVD writers.

@everyone else - I don't see why everybody's complaining all the time. If you don't want to buy a 400gb disc and write on it then don't! What I see from all this is a great potential for future PS3 games and BD titles with plenty of room for extra materials. Seriously, what's wrong with technology leaps? Yes it could always get better with speed, safety etc. But you never jump lightyears into the future, it takes time and research, this is just a step in the right direction imo.

And concerning the BD vs digital media (or DLC if you wish) - I think it's just stupid. I for one like to actually own a physical copy of whatever I buy. No matter if it's a game or a movie.

hmm, 1st clean up the external drive, 2nd dump all my audio and video files in 80-100 DVDs into 1 disc (and have another 1 for extra backup).

commercially, I hope Sony can come out an online game store that enables users to pack a few games in these 400GB compact data warehouse in custom for it's PS3. (legally of course )

and for those who working with huge capacity DB environment, congratulations that daily or monthly FULL backup will be easier then ever!

Why do people always use their dvd collections to justify the failure of blu-ray? I hope the manufacturers didn't advertise their blu-ray as state of the art dvd players. Just keep your dvd's and buy a BD player if you enjoy true HD. Buy new movies in BD. Watch old movies on the DVDs you already have. don't have to make it so complicated.

Plus, no one should compare up-scaling with 1080p. really come on, if you think up-scaling is anywhere comparable with 1080p you're probably still hugging onto your vhs collection as well.

BD will be adopted with time.