Sony and Panasonic to develop 300GB optical disc

http://broadcastengineering.com/blog/sony-and-panasonic-develop-300gb-optical-disc

 

Its 2013 and i still dont own a Blu-Ray player or burner. I dont see the need for a Blu Ray drive in the short term. (12-24 months)

But this is interesting, 300GB disc . . . thats HUGE!

 

I had expected way more storage from a Blu-Ray successor than 'just' 300GB, back in 2008(already almost 5 years ago) they made a 500GB Blu-Ray disc:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/Pioneer-Produces-500GB-Blu-ray-Disc

 

That would be great to backup important data (no mechanical device, so more safety against data loss)

@BoerenkoolMetWorst
I agree with you... perhaps only now they are able to develop something with economic viability.

 

They said 'at least' 300GB, not 'just'. Far higher capacities are listed in the article, including 1.5TB for Sony and 180TB for Panasonic.

 

Not for a single disc. Those are optical disc archives(already available afaik), Sony's 1.5TB uses 5 cartridges containing each 12 discs with 25GB capacity, and Panasonics 180TB uses 90x 12 discs with 100GB per disc.(Which is a total of 108TB according to my calculations) Panasonics are complimented for being so slim, but it's still hard to fit 20.8mm storage in the tray of an optical disc player, let alone 90 of them

 

It's not just about capacity, but also bandwidth. For example, today's BD format isn't fast enough for good quality 4K video without a new codec (unless they spin the discs faster, which would be noisy). If this new format can get 3-4x the bandwidth of BD while playing at standard speed, it should be sufficient for 4K movies.

Of course that would help with non-movie data as well.

 

I was thinking about this subject, and I wonder if there still is a big market for optical storage?

I mean, nowadays it´s all about flash based storage, like SSD´s and memory sticks.

Also, everone is downloading movies from the net (Netflix), no use to buy DVD´s.

A bit OT, but I´m still very happy that I own a Mini Disc system, was really sad to see it die.

 

Flash storage is still WAY more expensive than hard drives or optical discs, so it's unsuitable for archiving vast amounts of data. While hard drives are a good option, they still haven't quite returned to their pre-flooding price levels (from what I can tell).

As for movies, I'm sticking with discs for a while myself. My internet connection isn't fast enough to stream in HD, and even if it was the quality would pale in comparison to discs. Netflix's selection is missing quite a bit, and they lose the rights for certain content from time to time. I realize that streaming is "the future," but I'm not ready to embrace it full-time yet.

 

Yes perhaps it wasn´t a good example, but nowadays almost all recording is done via set top boxes with HDD. On the other hand, a lot of people are also downloading movies via torrents, not sure if they are burning them to DVD´s though.

Yes that´s true, I also don´t know what to think about services like Netflix and Hulu, sounds good in theory, but I´m not really down with these internet based video on demand services, I rather see the cable companies do it via the more reliable cable signal. That way you don´t have to connect your TV to the internet.