14 DAY TRIAL // I hate the fact that every new article I begin has to be somehow related to the words "CES" or "Las Vegas" but I guess that I (and you) will have to live with that for now. CES will end on the 11th and - until then - there are still a lot of interesting things that might catch your attention.
Recently, the HD-DVD standard jumped ahead of the competitor. I mean Blu-Ray, of course. The actual surpassing needed some time to happen but can be considered a jump nevertheless. And the guilty ones are, as always, the companies related to the movie business. At the moment, more than 200 titles are available in HD-DVD form while less than 70 Blu-Ray movies exist. Unfortunately Sony's management regarding Blu-Ray products and peripherals (see the PS3 case) was not among the best either. But thankfully, Sony is not the only producer which invests in Blu-Ray.
Things started to heat up at the end of the year with the mass release of 50GB rewritable disks. At the same time, compatible burners started to appear and although they are still over the $1,000 mark, things were looking better and better. And then TDK came.
TDK previewed yesterday at CES a huge 200 GB Blu-ray disc. The company claims it has enough storage space to host about 18 hours of high-definition video (encoded at 24 Mbps which should be enough to output a good picture quality). However the company said nothing about the availability of the disks.
TDK also showcased tiny 8cm Mini Blu-ray discs, which come with a standard 16.5 GB of storage space available on a single-layer. The Blu-ray mini-disks will be available in both BD-R and BD-RE formats. TDK said that they will also begin to ship inkjet and thermal printable BD-Rs in the 2nd quarter of 2007.