Can't imagine that Pioneer will allow the product to be long on the market before the issue you note is addressed.truenorth
I agree the technology is interesting, but I just have my doubts that optical media is the way of the future.
For movie distribution, Blu-ray has not set the world on fire. One reason is the relative cost of Blu-ray and DVDs and that many people don't think there is a worthwhile reason to upgrade their home players and TVs. Not only are the movies more expensive to buy or rent, even if people have a 720p or 1080p TV, many people won't see much difference between decently upscaled DVD and native 1080p material. Given the angular resolution of most people's eyes, honestly unless you have a very large big-screen TV and plan to sit very close to it, most people won't notice the difference at all. The human eye can differentiate to around 1 minute of arc, which at 4 metres (the width of my living room) translates to approx 1.25 millimetres, or about 20 pixels/inch. An HDTV has a resolution of 1920 pixels wide; at 20 pixels/inch this yields 96 inches--which means for a TV set smaller than 2.5 metres (around 8 feet) wide, the pixels won't contribute anything when I'm sitting 4 metres away, unless I have exceptionally good eyes. (I don't.) Even at 480i, with 720 pixels horizontally, at that distance, a 42 inch monitor will have roughly 20 pixels/inch, which is right at the edge of many people's perceptions.
As for data storage, I hardly ever burn disks any more. I have a dozen pen drives in sizes from 64 GB down to 4 GB, and around 6 TB of hard drive space spread around 8 internal, external and NAS drives. I am not sure why I would want a 128 GB RW disk, given the cost, but also because a scratch could lose me that much more data than the data I already don't burn onto DVD-RW. And don't get me started on dual layer! Maybe for data backups in business these disks would be a handy increase in capacity, but that is hardly the mass market that is going to drive prices down.
