Designers and manufacturers of optical drives think ahead of time and while one technology colonizes the market, there’s another one in the works. This is the case with the latest Blu-ray technology – while it is still struggling to become the most popular optical technology, its successor, called Ultra HD Blu-ray, has seen its specifications finished.
The new technology is designed to work with resolution at up to 3840 x 2160 pixels at 60 FPS. The new standard also brings a number of new features and technologies compared to the “regular” Blu-ray technology so expect to find support for HDR, the so-called Digital Bridge technology that allows users to copy content directly from an Ultra HD Blu-ray disk to a hard drive or a mobile device, support for 10-bit colors, improved color space (Rec. 2020) and more. A single Ultra HD Blu-ray disk layer can hold 33 GB of information but most disks will have two or three layers so they will be able to store 66 GB or 100 GB of information, respectively. Unfortunately you will need a new Ultra HD Blu-ray drive or player in order to take advantage of the new technologies but the good news is that all Ultra HD Blu-ray drives and players will be compatible with older Blu-ray and DVD disks.
The first Ultra HD Blu-ray disks and players are expected to appear before the end of the year.
Source: Blu-ray Disc Association