Blu-Ray disks do a great job for high quality movie lovers all over the world. Thanks to H.264 codec we have more data on the same space so video and sound quality are really on a way better level than DVD. That is good, but is it the boundary of the Blu-Ray technology or maybe not? Luckily – not, as Pioneer has recently declared. Pioneer developers experience a way to significantly increase capacity of Blu-Ray optical disks. This all not in a short term outlook of course, but anyway we are always glad to seize more milestones in any common technology, especially if it brings more possibilities to end users.For Pioneer high capacity disk of future Blu-Ray technology is a base, a boot camp. Starting point is common pick-up head (PUH) of the disks. Again in this case modern materials do a good half of the work. Pioneer High Fidelity Taiwan officially declared that a step forward in studying new materials can lead to multi-layer structure of the BD optical disk, which in turn means more disk space. 16 layers are expected, each with 20 GB of space on it, therefore overall capacity will be 400 GB on a single optical disk which can be read on a Blu-Ray player. This all will most probably be available in 2010 but only on read-only disks. This information is in Pioneer international roadmap. It also says that rewritable disks may be ready in 2012 and a surprise:1 TB on Blu-Ray optical disk in 2013. We'll see.
