The Future of BD Burners and Media

If the war between BD and HD-DVD is now over, it did not really change much the penetration of HD format in mass market, both for standalone HD player and for BD burners in our computers. Despite some price cuts, a BD player remains around 300€.
Nevertheless, all companies involved in this field are actively working in improving specifications and technologies. Last week, NEC announced a new controller able to manage BD burning at 8x, while being smaller in size and less power consuming than current models. Panasonic on its side announced new BD media certified for 6x burning speed. LG is already claiming that one can burn 4x BD media at 6x.
The most important evolution will most likely be the arrival of organic layer-based BD media which will be cheaper to produce as requiring only minor modification of the current DVD-R fabrication lines. They will also open up the doors for faster burning speed. However, as encoding of binary digital information is inverted on such media, one will have to update the firmware of all already existing BD burners when such media will be available…