Sony Could Increase Blu-ray Capacity By 33 Percent

Sony appears to be readying technology that would increase the capacity of Blu-ray discs from 25 Gbytes to 33.4 Gbytes, an increase in capacity of just over 33 percent.

Nikkei Electronics Asia quotes a source at Sony that says the partial response maximum likelihood (PRML) signal
processing would continue to use the blue-violet laser (at 405 nanometers) currently used by the existing Blu-ray technology.

The problem, according to the story, was determining the error rate of the Blu-ray media, which currently is assessed using jitter. The new technique uses a method called i-MLSE
(Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation) , which both Sony and Panasonic jointly developed in a paper presented in October.

Sony plans to propose that the Blu-ray Disc Association adopt i-MLSE, which would open the technology up for widespread adoption. The story doesn't speculate on how this might affect Blu-ray media prices, or how quickly the technology could be implemented into Blu-ray readers don't appear to be the hot sellers that DVD burners once were. However, the additional capacity could easily be used by additional featurettes and other content accompanying Blu-ray movies.