Published in News

New 300GB format to be next standard?

by on31 July 2013

Sony/Panasonic hope so, but not for consoles

Sony and Panasonic are working together on the development of a new 300GB optical disc format. The new format which the company is looking to see released in 2015 is said to be the logical successor to Blu-ray.

Of course this does beg the question on if this format is targeted at the next generation of consoles? While we know that both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will use Blu-ray as their optical disc format of choice, the new 300GB format will arrive too late for this generation of consoles, but sources tell us that it could be the standard for the generation after this, but both Microsoft and Sony are banking on digital download as a large part of the future, so the new format may not be on the radar of the generation of consoles after these.

So the new disc format with storage that is six times dual-layer Blu-ray will be targeted at the IT space for long term archive and also perhaps at a new format beyond Bu-ray to offer what is now called Ultra HD 4K which shatters the current HD resolution of 1920 x 1080 by delivering an astounding 4096 x 2160, but the Ultra HD TVs that have been introduced so far are delivering a resolution of 3840 x 2160 which is four times that of HD or Blu-ray.

Of course with the increased resolution, the need for larger storage media hold video captured at this resolution. For some time now many movies have been scanned or captured at 4K when they are remastered so it is only natural that a new format needs to be on the horizon to deliver content. It would be impractical to deliver 4K content at its native resolution by streaming.

The news may set off alarms to those to have upgraded from DVD to Blu-ray and shudder to think about another format on the horizon. We believe that while it is on the horizon, it will be some time before it actually arrives and you see studios delivering movie content on the new format. Instead we suspect that the initial target will be corporate IT with the need for long term optical archive and backup.

Rate this item
(0 votes)