DVD+RW Alliance releases 2.4x +RW specs

The Double Layer recording with the capacity of 8.5 gigabytes has not been a great success so far. The prices of the DL media has been so high, that it has made better sense to buy a pack of single layer discs instead. Despite the low sales figures, the -RW and +RW camps are both still developing the Double Layer technology further.

The DVD+RW Alliance, a voluntary association of industry-leading personal computer, optical storage and consumer electronics manufacturers that support the Plus format for DVD recording, has announced the release of version 1.0 specifications for 2.4X rewriting on Double Layer DVD+RW media by HP, Mitsubishi Kagaku Media/Verbatim, Royal Philips Electronics, Ricoh, Sony Corporation, Thomson Inc. and Yamaha.
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Due to its special characteristics, the new DVD+RW Double Layer media will only be read and write compatible with new specially designed recorders and read out devices. The read out reflectivity on both layers of the new media is very low when compared with traditional single layer DVD+RW media. Red laser reflectivity is specified between 5 and 10 percent for the new media and 15 to 20 percent for traditional single layer media.

Source: TMCNet