Verbatim Corporation along with its parent company, Mitsubishi Kagaku Media has announced that it will begin shipping 30GB HD DVD-R dual layer media to the North American markets during the first quarter once the launch of the first HD DVD-R DL writers takes place, according to a Verbatim press release.So far, Verbatim has been shipping HD DVD-R recordable media in Japan since July 2006 at the time of the first recordable HD DVD hardware.
These 30 GB DVD-R DL media feature a capacity of 150 minutes of High Definition video on a single side with support for AACS copy protection. As a data back-up medium, one DVD-R DL is enough to backup the average business laptop with most business and corporate laptop users only using a portion of their hard drive's capacity. The media has a highly sensitive recording dye to allow for power fluctuations and surface smudges while maintaining a low error rate and is highly resistant to sunlight and heat to provide long life, regardless of whether the media has been recorded.
With just a 5GB difference between a single layer Blu-ray disc and a dual layer HD DVD, it will be interesting to see what the pricing of this media will be like, considering single layer HD DVD-R media pricing is already around the price of single layer BD-R media. So far, no pricing or disc speed information has been announced, although the speed is most likely to be 1x with only 1x HD DVD-R Verbatim media available at this time. As Dual Layer recordable DVDs are still much more expensive than single layer DVDs, the initial pricing of HD DVD-R DL will likely be significantly more than single layer HD DVD-R.
