The Victor Company of Japan Ltd (JVC) developed the first prototype of an single objective glass lens with an numerical aperture (NA) of 0.95. The NA is an index that describes indirectly the resolution of an optical lens. Higher resolution means a higher ability to distinguish between small objects. That allows to reduce the track pitch and store an higher amount of data on a disk.
Drives mounted with such a lens are theoretically able to store more than 40GB on each side of an optical disk. Of course requires the fabrication of such a lens much more precesion than the fabrication of a commercial NA 0.85 lens. According to an employee of the company was it extremly difficult to secure the sharp slope of the lens face as precisely as required when molding a lens of such a high NA but Victor has achieved a molding error of less than 0.1 micron, an equivalent error that occures with its existing NA 0.85 lenses, by "polishing every molding technology".
Victor Japan intends to adapt this technology to its NA 0.85 objective lenses for BD. The technology is expected to promote the use of BD devices in mobile equipment, such as portable BD players
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This technical progress is surely not inexpensive, so let us hope that its price will not be reflected in the price of the drives. However, I think Blu-ray is the future and this is for sure not the last improvement on this young and great technology.
Read the full article over at NEAsia. If you are interested and want more information about Blu-ray, please visit our Satellite, HD-TV, Blu-ray and HD-DVD Forum
Source: NEAsia
