It's a rather well-known fact that Sony's Blu-ray format, despite actually winning the format war, is not exactly faring very well, its rate of adoption being still pretty far from what its supporters initially hoped. Nevertheless, this might soon change, since the Japanese company has just made a major breakthrough in Blu-ray development, creating a laser diode that enables write speeds of up to 12X, as well as storage spaces of up to 100 GB.

The new Blu-ray laser has a continuous optical output of 200 mW, as well as a pulse optical output of 450 mW. Other important figures worth mentioning are the oscillation wavelength (405nm) and the beam divergence angles, of 8.5 degrees on horizontal direction and 19 degrees on vertical direction.

Practically, by increasing the power of the Blu-ray diode, the laser will be able to actually penetrate deeper than before (4 layers-deep, to be more precise). In this way, both the storage capacity and the data transfer rates are actually seriously improved, and the manufacturers are giving a very pertinent example: around 8 hours of high-definition content could be recorded to the Blu-ray disc in approximately 10 minutes (assuming a constant burn speed), which is quite an impressive figure, compared to what we can see nowadays as a standard on the market.

Besides making the laser beam more powerful, Sanyo's engineers have also improved the structure of the laser-emitting diode itself. The new structure, dubbed LASTECT 2, enables the diode to support the higher power outputs mentioned earlier and also delivers a seriously improved level of efficiency.

As expected, implementing this new technology into commercially-available products will take some time, but given the fact that it opens the way for faster speeds and double the content, we certainly hope that the adoption time will be a pretty short one.


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