When I first started in this business, Half Height DVD burner write speeds were at 4x (I know I’m late as many of you can recall how exciting it was for the CD burner to reach 4x speeds). Then quickly everyone jumped to 8x speed while Plextor unleashed the 12x speed burner. The rest of the story follows where all other companies bypassed 12x for 16x speed and then 20x, and now settled at 24x.

The H/H Blu-ray drive models have followed suit for the most part. First starting with 2x speed, then jumping to 4x followed by 8x and now Pioneer announcing their 12x BDR-205 burner. It’s only a matter of time before a company looking to boost their credibility offers the 16x burner and then by extension the bar will be raised and leaped multiple times.

Just as there were constant comparisons and arguments as to the merits of DVD over CD (which by all accounts should have been extinct years ago) the DVD suffers the slings and arrows of Blu-ray enthusiast constantly writing its obituary for another format that refuses to go away. So even though the writing speed will continue to improve, Blu-ray one day will inevitably meet another format that becomes the natural successor with greater capacity and capabilities and we will simply recycle this article and change the names to the new format of the day. At least I’m confident there will be a physical medium by which people store data and need to copy it, so I feel confident this industry will continue on like the resilient CD and DVD who learned their lessons from the still not totally gone floppy disk and VHS.