Disc vendor snubs HD-DVD for Blu-ray

TDK, one of the leading vendors of DVD discs, is not going to sell media for next-generation high definition HD-DVD drives and will concentrate instead on rival Blu-ray.

The company, a member of the Blu-ray Association, has long been a backer of the technology, but other media vendors, such as Imation, are happy to sell both Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs.

Corporate strategy director Jean-Paul Eekhout agreed that sticking to Blu-ray would limit TDK's market initially; but he believed it would win the battle with HD-DVD because it offers more capacity (25GB per disc compared with 15GB) and would, he claimed, bring burners to the market sooner.

He said Blu-ray would also get a big boost with the release of Sony's Playstation 3 games console this year.

TDK will offer both read-only and rewritable discs, known respectively as BD and BD-RE media (the RW suffix of previous disc generations has been dropped, apparently for the benefit of non-English speakers, to whom it naturally makes more sense than giving 'writable' a ghost 'w').

Blu-ray capacities and read-write speeds are expected to rise quickly after the first drives are launched. Eekhout said TDK had already produced four-layer discs capable of storing 200GB.

He demonstrated a hard coating TDK is giving its disks which protects BD data, which sits far closer to the surface than on CDs and DVDs.

He rubbed both a standard disc and coated one with wire wool, showing how one was scratched and the other was not.

Eekhout admitted that BD media manufacturer required more investment than HD-DVD discs, which supporters say can be made in DVD plants.

But he said HD-DVD would also need some investment and that the difference would not be reflected in the prices of the media.