Ricoh Co., Ltd has developed recordable disks for Blue-ray Disk and HD DVD, the next-generation DVD formats, and starts shipping samples to hardware manufacturers. The samples to be shipped are BD-R and HD DVD-R, write-once disks for Blue-ray Disk and HD DVD respectively. They have a capacity of 25 GB (BD-R) and 15 GB (HD DVD-R), approximately three to five times that of current disks.

By employing highly sensitive inorganic recording materials and high-precision stampers newly developed for next-generation recordable DVDs, Ricoh was able to achieve high reliability when writing and reading data. This will provide an advantage in further speed increases and multilayer structures.

Next-generation writable DVDs are gradually penetrating into the IT and consumer electronics markets, which are expected to expand rapidly from 2008 and reach 800 million or more pieces being shipped in 2010.

Ricoh’s optical disk business consists of development and sales of a variety of recordable writable DVDs and hybrid CD-Rs (CDs with both ROM and recordable areas in a single disk), while also selling its own recording materials and licensing and providing its own manufacturing technologies.

Ricoh aims to provide the newly developed next-generation recordable DVDs to end-user customers within the year.

Source: Ricoh press release