Pioneer's 1TB Blu-ray discs could work in PS3
For god's sake, NOBODY tell Hideo Kojima
Thought Blu-ray was stuck at a lousy 50GB? Think again; Pioneer has whipped up a selection of new prototype discs that, while not technically qualifying as Blu-ray right now, could one day be compatible with existing Blu-ray players, including Sony’s PS3 games console.
Pioneer has been showing off its uber-discs at the IT Month Fair in Taipei. It has prototype 400GB, 500GB and 1TB versions on show. The company has achieved this incredible storage feat by squeezing 16 layers onto the disc’s surface. Read only 400GB and 500GB flavours, which probably have enough space to draw special edition movie content out into weeks, are due out between now and 2010. So probably 2009 then.
Rewriteable versions are set to follow a couple of years later. The mega 1TB discs won’t be unleashed until the smaller variants have reached a gentle boil in the market place.
Amazingly, these same discs are expected to be compatible with existing players. We’re guessing a firmware update might be involved. The PS3 is well equipped for this upgrade too – Sony is never shy about issuing updates either – and the games could only benefit from the extra space.
Well, we say that, but perhaps a few space constraints are helpful to prevent certain game developers from packing their games full of diabolically long cut-scenes. Clearly also, the fact that the Xbox is managing to come up with perfectly good looking games on humble old DVDs, makes it clear that size isn’t everything. However, next time we are forced to play a dreadful movie licensed video game, the least we should expect is to get an HD version of the movie on the same disc.
Link: Pioneer (via Edge, TechRadar)
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By Naz91
5|12|2008 19:48
Well, it'll be interesting to see what PS3 devs actually DO with all that extra space, Al. More expansive game worlds? I hope so. Knowing Hideo Kojima, he'll probably make a 50 hour cutscene or something