Hitachi demonstrated the playback of a four layer Blu-ray Disc at
CES this week. The Japanese website, Tech-On!, has reported that the drive used in the demonstration was based on the GBW-H10N. Only minor changes to the
drive's firmware and optical system were needed to get it to read the four layer discs.
At the 2007 International CES,
Hitachi, Ltd. has demonstrated playback of a Blu-ray Disc (BD) with four recording layers at its booth. Featuring 25 GB capacity per
layer, a disc can record up to 100 GB data.
There have been other
academic reports of creating four- or six-layer disc media and demonstration of picking up signals from those discs using test players
embedded with a special optical head, but, according to Hitachi, "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."
An optical disc drive based on the "GBW-H10N"
supporting 4x speed BD recording, which Hitachi-LG Data Storage, Inc. announced in July 2006, was used for the demonstration. The
four-layer disc used in the demonstration was an outside company's product, but a Hitachi spokesperson said, "We cannot tell the name of
its supplier."
While four layer discs are still in the developmental stage, this is definitely a good sign. If you'd like
to read more, the entire article can be found here.
