Japanese mega-pair reveal details of DV tape-busting format

JAPANESE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS giants Canon and Matsushita have let slip some details of their new 2-inch, 3GB optical discs, set for integration into next-generation digital video cameras. The pair will be hoping to make the disk the standard replacement for Digital Video tape.

The pair claimed to have increased the surface recording density on their funky new discs to match that of next- generation ("Blue-ray") DVDs while using the same light source (red semiconductor laser) and objective lens (NA: 0.6) as those of the existing DVD format.

The companies reckon the small disks can store around an hour of MPEG-2-coded video at the encoding speed of 6Mbps and claim data transmission rates of up to 24Mbps.

Discussing the format at the Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2002 symposium in Hawaii, last week, the partners revealed that the single track on the disc is divided into 1,280 segments, and that each segment has a header area. Each header area sports two types of pits for controlling its servo mechanism a pair of "wobble pits" and a 1-bit address pit, allowing an improved density for data storage.

The disk format is still in development, but samples may appear later next year. µ