The 50th Anniversary of the Optical Disc  

From the “laser disc” to “Blu-ray”

History of the optical disk

optical disc using a transparent disc technology. The disc is 30 centimeters in diameter and uses an analog format and laser technology. It is also called “laser disc” He patented his design in 1961.
Further development of the optic disc were patented in 1969.
In 1967, the company David Paul Gregg, Gaus Electrophysics, contacted Royal Philips Electronics, but was met with indifference.
The laser disc player sold only about one million units in the United States and about four million in Japan and the last LD released in Japan was the “Tokyo Raiders” in 2001.

http://laserdiscplanet.com/museum.html

One influential contributors to the audio, video and data, is Kees Immink.

Dr Kees A. Schouhamer Immink was born December 18, 1946 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He joined Philips Research Laboratories in 1971.
His contribution to the technology of digital audio and video has allowed all of us listen to audio and watch video on reliable, high quality media. Dr. Immink coding methods are essential for CD and DVD. For a complete biography of Kees Immink see:
http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/history_center/biography/immink.html

optical disk video, but they had never heard of.

The Compact Disc format

The CD uses a red laser to scan the patterns of bumps on a mirror surface that are interpreted as bits. These bits can be assembled into bytes. A CD can hold about 700 megabytes of data or approximately 80 minutes of music.

It was adopted by the Disc Digital Audio and ratified as IEC 908.

http://www.exp-math.uni-essen.de/ ~ Immink / pdf / cdstory.htm

2. Data storage on CD-ROM
3. Write-once audio and data storage on CD-R
4. Rewritable CD-RW

play movies and video storage “super density” of data.

Two teams set to work to produce a video disc to replace the VHS tape;. The team of Philips and Sony and Toshiba
Philips and Sony began on multimedia CD(MMCD) and Toshiba disk density super. Reviews focus on each of these “Multi Media” and “Super Density”. Of course, these two had both video and data capabilities in mind.
Multi Media Compact Disc(MMCD) 1990 Philips and Sony

Super Density Disc(SD) 1990 Toshiba

DVD

With two competing options, the one offered by Sony / Philips and the other by Toshiba, it seemed to be on the edge of another format war. It looked like a repeat of the battle of the formats of the 1980s when the Sony Betamax was fighting with the “System Home Video” VHS standards, to the detriment of the consumer. What does the consumer buy? In my opinion the Betamax was a better option, but the consumer market has decided, and the victory went to VHS.

But the battle did not prevent take place through the mediation of Lou Gerstner, chairman of IBM, a compromise was reached.
The format of Sony and Philips MMCD has been dropped and the Toshiba SD format was adopted with two additions:

pit geometry that allows the monitoring of push-pull, a proprietary technology of Philips and Sony, and EFMplus, created by Kees Immink. EFMplus encoder is based on a deterministic finite state machine having four states, which results in words of 8 bits into 16 bits of passwords.

This compromise created the DVD format, which has become the standard format in December 1995 and will continue as such until the majority of people will no longer be satisfied with “standard video”, but requires Video high density for all films there. The new Blu-ray format will take over.

Format DVD

The DVD uses a red laser to scan the patterns of bumps on a surface mirror, which are interpreted as bits. These bits can be assembled into bytes juice on a CD. However, the bumps and the tracks on a DVD are much smaller and can contain much more information, up to 4.7GB.

Professional Disc for Data(PDD)

With the decision in favor of Toshiba's Super Density disc, and the abandonment of the Multi Media Compact Disc(MMCD) as the main technology for DVD, Sony decided to design a disc they called Professional Disc for Data(PDD). The need for higher capacity disk for the next high-density television systems was a certainty.
Sony introduced the TED in 2003 and became available in 2004. This new format used the 405nm(Nana meter), BLU-violet laser to read and write to disk, enabling data storage much more than the red laser used in DVD. The disk capacity was compared to 4.5 GB for a 23GB single-layer DVD.

The PDD format has been very short and was abandoned in 2007. Which allowed the next generation of optical media for the team from Philips / Sony, the Blu-ray.

Blu-Ray

Blu-ray technology was developed jointly by Sony and Philips, with a board range.

Apple, Inc. Dell HP Hitachi LG Mitsubishi Electric Panasonic Pioneer Philips Samsung Sharp Sony
Sun Microsystems TDK Thomson Twentieth Century Fox
Walt Disney Warner Bros

Blu-ray uses a 405nm wavelength blue-violet laser and a narrow track pitch of 0.85
The surface layer is 0.1 mm thick, which allows the laser to focus at the opening of 0.85.

The disk uses a hard coating polymer called sus, which was developed by TDK and is supposed to be? extremely resilient and fingerprint resistant.
The Java platform, which is used for menus and multimedia, is mandatory. Blu-ray systems must support JVM.
Capacity

ROM single layer 25 GB
Rom dual layer 50GB
RW single layer 27 GB
RW Dual Layer 54GB
100GB highest test
theoretical limit of 200 GB

HD DVD

Toshiba
ROM single layer 15 GB
Rom dual layer 30 GB
45GB highest test
60 GB of theoretical limit

Abandoned February 19, 2008

Copyright © Jacob Romeyn