New rewritable disc to offer 8.5GB of storage using double-layer single-sided recording.

Entertainment electronics company JVC has announced it has developed the world’s first dual-layer single-sided DVD-RW disc to go on sale in August 2007.

The new disc conforms to the recently adopted DVD-RW for DL Version 2.0 standard and will work on any drive supporting this standard.

The new disc, coded VD-W85A, can store up to 8.5GB of data at a maximum of 2X-speed (22.16Mbits/second) and can be rewritten approximately 1000 times according to JVC.

One of the tricks JVC has used to make the new disc possible is what the company calls “inverse stacking” which effectively swaps the various protective, reflective and writing parts of the two recording layers before joining the two recording layers together. JVC says the discs are also hard-coated to give greater protection to the recording layers.

The disc recording technology uses similar phase-change recording as currently used on single-layer 4.7GB DVD-RW media. The discs are expected to be 1.2mm thick, based on two 0.6mm polycarbonate substrates bonded together. JVC will manufacture the new discs in Japan.

At present, no currently-released DVD burners support DVD-RW for DL Version 2.0 however expect a raft of new drives to be released by the likes of Pioneer, LG and others to take advantage of the new media. Depending on the requirements of the new media, it may be possible to upgrade previous-generation DVD-RW burners to handle the new discs however, that has not been confirmed.

JVC will also use exclusive M2 (metal on metal) stamper technology to improve reliability of its new DVD-RW DL media but to also improve recording characteristics and reduce and stabilise the media’s jitter. 

The company has not released information on price but discs are expected to become available in late August 2007.

The news comes as DVD faces increasingly stiff competition from higher-capacity formats Blu-ray and HD DVD, which have already started to arrive on the PC peripheral market.

But with 25GB Blu-ray rewriteable (BD-RE) discs still selling for around $US25-30 each, DVD-RW DL media still has an opportunity to make its mark in the consumer storage market.

JVC released forecasts that the demand recordable media market is expected to rise by 21% in 2007 over the 5.727billion discs sold in 2006. The demand for rewriteable DVD media is expected to grow by the same amount. By 2008, the demand for DVD media will outstrip the need for recordable CD media.

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3.20 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."