Pioneer Presents Its 400GB Optical Disc

Tokyo-based multinational corporation that deals with digital entertainment products, Pioneer, claims to create world's first optical disc with 16 layers. The company's officials did not reveal any details regarding the format of the medium, but they said that each data layer features the same capacity as a Blu-ray disk.

Having 16 layers, each with a capacity of 25 GB, means that the disk can store information on a 400GB space. The capacity of Pioneer's disk is twice the capacity of a 200GB disk that TDK has been developing for a couple of years, claiming that it would be the future of Blu-ray.

However, the Pioneer's disk is currently read-only, which means that is will be used for pre-recorded content. The company's representatives stated that Pioneer managed to deal with the issue regarding the interference between the surface of the disk and the surface that the player wants to read.

In order to develop "16-layer optical disc that can play back high-quality signals from every layer" the company mentioned that it applied a range of optical and signal processing methods.

Besides that data capacity of each layer, the Blu-ray spec is also matched by the optical features of the lens. The result, Pioneer mentioned that "it is possible to maintain compatibility between the new 16-layer optical disc and the BD discs".

In addition to the fact that each layer of the disk has the capacity of a Blu-ray disk, Pioneers creation is green too: "The 16-layer optical disc technology, capable of storing much more data than the conventional discs on one disc, will greatly reduce the number of discs to be used and therefore contribute to the conservation of resources," said the company's representatives.