Sony Increasing Blu-Ray Disc Capacity

Sony and Panasonic have just announced plans to up the capacity of Blu-Ray discs from 25GB to 33.4GB. This is important for gamers because the PlayStation 3 games currently are put on these discs.

According to the report from Nikkei, this is done by using new approaches to evaluate the content on the disc. Currently Blu-Ray drives use jitter to evaluate the optical disc quality, which becomes harder to determine as you get near the 33.4GB mark, which this new solution provides a fix for.

The new discs will be compatible with all existing Blu-Ray players, only requiring a firmware update. Since some players are unable to be updated, it is more likely that the new technology will be used for PlayStation 3 games, which provide a easy mechanism for firmware updates. One other extra feature is that this applies to dual-layer discs, so 66.8GB dual-layered discs could be coming down the pipeline eventually.