A NEW DVD FORMAT will be unveiled by the DVD consortium this year in a bid to fight back against the Blu-Ray formats being promoted by Sony. Toshiba and NEC will take the lead on the format, expected to be released this year, which may give four times the capacity of existing disks.
The disks will be the same size and will use leading edge blue ray lasers to increase density. Reports said that single side and single layer DVDs will provide 20GB of data space and when they"re pushed into double layer mode, that means a DVD disk will hold around 40GB of data.
Otherwise the disks will look identical to the current standard, but the players will have to take account of the new format too.