Pioneer has developed a 16-layer 400GB optical disc, which it is exhibiting at the IT Month fair taking place in Taipei. According to Pioneer, its 16-layer disc uses a breakthrough in the reflective layer material, which allows read-back using the same pick-up head specifications as for existing blank Blu-ray discs. This eliminates the need to develop new pick-up heads, as the pick-up heads used in Blu-ray disc players would be able to read these discs.
Pioneer expects to have read-only 400GB discs available between 2008 and 2010, followed by rewritable discs between 2010 and 2012. They are currently working on a 20-layer 500GB optical disc and aim to have a 1TB disc developed in 2013. The 400GB disc features a dielectric reflective layer and track pitches of 10 & 14mm. It requires a pick-up head wavelength of 405nm and numerical aperture of 0.85, the same specifications as existing Blu-ray pick-up heads.
While Pioneer said that these discs can be read in Blu-ray disc players, it is unclear whether a firmware upgrade would be all that is required and whether all Blu-ray players currently available would be able to handle all 16 layers on these discs. Even if all existing Blu-ray players can read these discs, there are not many games or movies that would require more than the 50GB capacity available with current Blu-ray discs.
However, if Pioneer could develop recordable 400GB versions with a reasonable price per Gigabyte, they would be an ideal way of backing up one's complete media centre content on just a few discs. At present, one would need at least 8 blank Blu-ray discs for every 400GB they want to pack up and 8 BD-R DL discs still cost more than a typical 500GB USB hard disk. So hopefully these 400GB discs would not be over 8 times the price of BD-R DL. Otherwise that would be one very expensive coaster if the write process fails!
