Blu-ray has faced down some pretty significant criticisms in its rise to dominance over the past few years, but complaints about its storage capacity was never one of them. Never the less a research partnership between Panasonic and Sony has yielded a new technique which will increase disk capacities from 25GB per layer to 33GB. Normally a small jump like this would have us rolling our eyes when it comes to the prospect of replacing all our hardware, but interestingly enough, it appears as though the jump in capacity can be achieved using the optics in our current players.

The new  standard is called i-MLSE which stands for Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation, this is a method of estimating the read error rate of disks on the fly. If all goes as planned the only action users will need to take to read the disks would be a firmware update on existing players. There is no timeline for the rollout yet, but Sony is set to propose the adoption of i-MLSE to the Blu-ray Disk Association in the coming months, which as you might imagine, they have a fair bit of sway over.

Anyone out there backing up to Blu-ray disks yet?

OWC has introduced a quad-interface Blu-ray burner that uses a Pioneer BDR-205. You will never be short of options with the Mercury Pro 12x Blu-ray burner as it supports four different interfaces: FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0 and eSATA. It ships with a cable each four all the interfaces that it supports. It is capable of writing to BD-R media ( single or double layer) at 12x speed, BD-RE media at 2x speed, DVD±R at 16X, DVD±R DL at 8X, and CD-R at 40X. The Mercury Pro 12x Blu-ray burner can be yours for $350. The burner is also available along with Roxio's Toast 10 Titanium Pro for $450, though the bundle is only meant for Mac users.

Image Credit: OCW