TDK joins Blu-ray Disc group

The Blu-ray Disc Founders announced Thursday the addition of TDK to its group. TDK will produce bare Blu-ray discs to be used by drives manufactured by other members of the group. Those companies include Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Pioneer, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, Sony and Thomson Multimedia. Blu-ray Disc technology is meant to take advantage of two trends: the growing use of high definition television and broadband entertainment.

The Blu-ray Disc format uses blue laser light and is considered a successor to today's red-laser DVD drives. Blu-ray Disc technology allows up to 27GB of storage on a single-sided disc, compared with 4.7GB on current DVDs. A rewritable disc with a dual layer on the same side that holds up to 50GB of data is being developed by the group. In addition, it is working on read-only (BD-ROM) and record-only (BD-R) formats. The rewritable format has been available since February last year. Products using the format are set for release in late 2005.