A Tokyo based meeting was held this week by the Blu-ray disc founders including Sony, Dell, Panasonic and many others, in which Sony revealed that it will be using the Blu-ray disc format in their PlayStation 3 console.
The new Blu-ray discs can hold five times as much data as DVDs and are set to replace DVDs as the standard film media over the coming years. Blu-ray utilises more accurate blue laser light rather than the normal red laser light to read and write data which gives the medium increased data storing properties.
Sony officials confirmed that the next iteration of the PlayStation home console will be equipped with a Blu-ray disc drive, allowing it to play back high definition movies as well as providing more space for game developers on the discs.
Single-layer Blu-ray discs can store up to 27GB on one layer of data, compared to 4.7GB on DVDs, although the version of the standard favoured by Sony holds only 23GB – still around five times larger than existing DVD discs. The Blu-ray specification also allows for reading existing DVD discs, so the PS3 will still be able to handle standard DVD movies and play PS2 and titles.
Video playback units based on the new read-only standard are expected to appear by the end of the current fiscal year, which runs through to March 2005 – the same timescale in which Sony plans to unveil the PlayStation 3 in public for the first time.