Reading around recently I have discovered that there is certainly some movement in the writable Blu-ray Disc sector.

Engadget is reporting that NEC is planning silicon to support BD-R recording at 8x speed. The recording speed of BD-R was initially only 2x, so this represents a nice saving in record time. 8x speed should be 36 MBps, which may actually tax some slower hard drives!

Engadget also reported that the 6x media has been spotted in Japan. This media should be compatible with the 6x recorders that are available in the USA. I recently purchased my second burner - which is a 6x LG drive - and hope to be in Japan next month so hopefully I will be able to evaluate this and report at that time.

One of the major complaints I have personally had is the scarcity and cost of printable media. It looks like Ritek as come to the rescue with their 25GB 2X BD-R Inkjet Printable 25 Pack Cake Box. The pricing of $200 for the 25 discs is only $8 per disc! I have used a couple of the Ritek BD-R discs and had no trouble with the burning, verification or playback from these, so it looks like a pretty nice solution - or at least a good start that should encourage the Japanese BD-R producers to try to compete.

Alternatively, there is the Aleratec 25GB 4X BD-R LightScribe 10 Pack - though these are somewhat expensive at $28 per disc and I have never had any personal experience with Aleratec.

Verbatim is introducing the mini BD-RE. Measuring 8 cm in diameter, the new 7.5 GB discs provide approximately one hour of continuous video capture time on a single side when high definition (1920×1080) is used, and approximately two hours of video capture time with images recorded at 1440×1080. These discs feature the usual hard coats as the full sized 12cm versions.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Technology, Writable Discs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.