I wonder how long it will be before we see these in North America.
Panasonic Introduces World's First 6X Write-once Blu-ray Disc Media
Tokyo, June 18, 2008 - (JCN Newswire) - Panasonic, the leading brand by which Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. is known, announced today that it has developed the world's first Write-Once Blu-ray Discs(BD-R) with 6X writing speed*. The new discs will be available in Japan with both 25GB and 50GB capacities in July.
Panasonic, which introduced the world's first dual-layer 1X BD-RE Blu-ray Disc in 2004**, 2X BD-R/RE Discs in 2006, and 4X BD-R Disc in 2007, is now launching the world's first 6X BD-R to meet consumer demand to write and read large amounts of data at a higher speed. The new 6X discs have a maximum data transfer speed of 216Mbps, which is 20% faster than that of 16X DVD-R discs. This transfer speed, along with the discs' high capacity, allows consumers to use these discs for a variety of applications such as storing High Definition video or backing up PC data.
The new discs have a wide power margin at any writing speeds from 1X to 6X. This enables high-quality recording, even if the drive's laser power fluctuates, resulting in greater overall drive compatibility.
Panasonic's adoption of newly-developed disc technology produces extremely level and well-balanced discs with highly precise signal grooves. This improves servo characteristics and enables the laser beam to focus to the right position even when the disc is rotating with 6X high speed, thus providing optimum reading and writing performance.
Blu-ray disc drives compatible with 6X write-once Blu-ray discs are planned to be commercialized in Japan by the end of September 2008.
*As of June 18, 2008, as 6x recordable Blu-ray disc
**The capacity of Blu-ray discs is expressed in units of 1GB=1 billion bytes, but the capacity is slightly below that after formatting, so that the actual amount area that can be used will be less.
***Introduced in Japanese market only.
- Panasonic 6x BD-R b.png (128.54 KiB) Viewed 1673 times
