Hideo Kojima is probably in tears right now. The newest Blu-Ray offering from Pioneer is a monstrous 400 GB disk. It is composed of 16 beautifully blue layers. Previously this feat was unavailable to Pioneer, but apparently lessons learned while making DVDs larger has helped the process.
Pioneer had this to say to TechRadar about the announcement:
Since the optical specifications of the objective lens…are the same as those for the existing BD discs, it is possible to maintain compatibility between the new 16-layer optical disc and the BD discs.
I’m not going to pretend to understand tech babble, or the drawbacks to a disk this huge. What I will say is that this sounds incredible. 400GB is a ridiculously large amount of space to work with. If this disk ever becomes available to the market at a decent cost, developers for the PS3 should never have a spacing concern again. We might even be able to experience a completely uncompressed game as well.
I wondered, after Toshiba folded the HD DVD market, if we would see a radical growth in the potential of the Blu-Ray disk. Now that it’s confined to one medium, it looks as though that dream is being realized. Pioneer will have a show-and-tell for the disk in a few days if they can fit it through the door. Until then, Kojima and I can dream of the possibilities together.
