The laser can emit a beam of 450 milliwatts, which is about double the power of Sanyo's current highest-power laser for Blu-ray Disc systems. The higher power means it can write and read data on discs with up to four data layers and at speeds of up to 12X, Sanyo said today.
Each recording layer on a Blu-ray Disc can store 25GB of data, and the highest-capacity commercial discs currently have two recording layers. A four-layer disc would be able to hold 100GB of data, which translates to about eight hours of high-definition video, and at 12X speed, all that data could be burned to the disc in just 10 minutes.
