Good day to be a shopper for DVDs in Japan apparently! It seems that Mitsubishi has just released the worlds first 8.5GB DVD-R DL disc. To many this must seem like no big deal. But to those of you that understand the nature of things, you realize just how big a deal this really is. This is totally amazing!

Mitsubishi Kagaku Media Co., Ltd. (MKM) today announced the world’s first dual layer DVD-R disc made to DL standards to be launched this spring.

“Sales of DVD recording drives show tremendous increases worldwide,” says Shigeru Tamura, MKM Chief Information Officer. “And industry estimates*2 put demand for DVD discs in 2005 at some 2.5 billion units, which is a year-on-year increase of 79%.” As users record more images and movies, data density increases and people ask for greater capacity DVD recording discs. To meet this demand, MKM launched the world’s first double layer DVD+R discs in May 2004, which were well received in the market. Now, MKM will be the first one to launch a single sided dual layer media in the DVD-R format, which is the most popular format.

With development of this new disc, capacity of DVD-R discs is now double*3 that of conventional discs of this type. When using these new discs in compatible DVD drives, not only large amounts of data can be recorded continuously on the discs, but also the discs can be used in conventional DVD players of PC DVD-ROM drives to playback the recordings.