Audio Video News

The electronics world was astounded when the Digital Versatile Disc appeared, offering more than six times the storage capacity of standard compact discs. The trend toward ever greater data capacity continues, to the delight of engineers and technophiles everywhere.

One laboratory development of special interest to video fans is a recent announcement by Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial that it has developed a two-sided optical rewritable disc capable of storing up to 100 gigabytes of data. Ordinary DVDs have a capacity of about 4.7GB, sufficient to handle most two-hour movies encoded in the MPEG-2 format.

The thinly-coated discs are two-sided, with 50GB of capacity per side, and are read by a short-wavelength violet laser, which makes them incompatible with current DVD players. Hitachi and Matsushita are experimental partners in a Sony/Philips development project for high-density optical recording and playback. Other companies, such as Constellation 3D, are working on other varieties of high-density optical storage, including the Fluorescent Multi-layer Disc (FMD), also capable of storing up to 100GB of data.

At present, 100GB discs are merely tantalizing laboratory curiosities. There are no immediate plans for commercial products using high-capacity violet-laser discs, but Matsushita believes they will be incorporated into products for the next generation of DVD discs. Company officials unveiled their results Friday, October 19 at the International Symposium on Optical Memory held in Taipei, Taiwan.