Sony Tech Could Boost Blu-ray Capacity By 33 Percent

Sony appears to be readying technology that would increase the capacity of Blu-ray discs from 25GB to 33.4 GB, an increase in capacity of just over 33 percent.

Nikkei Electronics Asia quotes a source at Sony that says the partial response maximum likelihood (PRML) signal processing would continue to use the blue-violet laser (at 405nm) currently used by the existing Blu-ray technology.

The problem, according to the story, was determining the error rate of the Blu-ray media, which currently is assessed using jitter. The new technique uses a method called i-MLSE (Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation), which both Sony and Panasonic jointly developed in a paper presented in October.

Sony plans to propose that the Blu-ray Disc Association adopt i-MLSE, which would open the technology up for widespread adoption. The story doesn't speculate on how this might affect Blu-ray media prices, or how quickly the technology could be implemented into Blu-ray readers that don't appear to be the hot sellers that DVD burners once were. However, the additional capacity could easily be used by additional featurettes and other content accompanying Blu-ray movies.