In the world of optical media, the Blu-ray format is undoubtedly the future market standard. The technology is bound to improve and this can only mean one thing: users will be able to acquire higher capacity Blu-ray discs for less the money. Even more, to make matters only better, it seems that this technological improvement we've been talking about is already here. Pioneer announced today that it has succeeded in developing a 16-layer read-only optical disc with a staggering capacity of 400 gigabytes.

The company's accomplishment marks a first in the industry, as none of its many competitors have announced such a device so far. Pioneer's optical disc has a capacity of 25 gigabytes per layer and uses a technology that should also work for the creation and manufacturing of multilayer recordable discs. This means we should see higher capacity Blu-ray discs being offered on the market, despite the fact that there are some who wonder whether these discs will be compatible with current players. Details about the company's breakthrough should emerge on July 13th, on the occasion of the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2008, when Pioneer is expected to discuss the upcoming product in all particulars.

The 16-layer optical disc technology is able of storing much more data on one disc when compared with the conventional discs. Even more, once it becomes an industry standard, it will greatly reduce the number of discs.

The Blu-ray Disc has been developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association, a group of companies of which Pioneer has been a member of ever since the founding. Pioneer manufactures and also sells Blu-ray Discs, as well as devices meant to read and write these high-capacity optical drives. Currently, the highest capacity Blu-ray disc is built using a dual layer technology and offers approximately 50GB of storage space, making it ideal for high-definition movies.