Blu-Ray discs get small enough for PSP
By Jonathan Schlaffer
The PSP is the ultimate portable gaming machine, there is almost nothing it can’t do, there’s even a version of Skype for it. The only thing that could make it better is to do away the the UMD format and equip it with a touchscreen. Only now have Blu-Ray discs been available in such a small form factor. Just don’t expect it to come to the PSP very soon and there’s no guarantee that it will.
Let’s take a trip over to India where mobile phone manufacturer, Spice has contracted with Vmedia to integrate that company’s optical drive into its phones. The drive and discs are very similar to those used on the PSP but with a difference. While the UMD format used on the PSP uses “red” laser technology, these discs are manufactured using “blue” laser technology. They are not all that different from Blu-Ray discs, except in size.
The “blue” laser allows more data to be stored on a smaller disc. UMD media manages to fit between 900MB and 1.8GB on a single disc. At its best the discs from Vmedia store 2GB which is only 200MB more but 200MB is 200MB. It also appears to be about half the size of a UMD.
According to TechTree, the 2GB capacity of the Vmedia discs is enough to store a 2.5 hour movie. If there is a PSP2, it would be a real shame if it didn’t make use of these discs. Of course, that means that current UMDs won’t work in it. I guess it’s either this or provide games in an all digital format and equip the PSP2 with a 32GB or 64GB SSD. How about equipping it with both, older UMD games could be downloaded and stored to the SSD and new games could be available on the Vmedia discs and “installed” to the PSP2’s SSD.
I hope someone with Sony management is writing this down, it only took all of three minutes for me to think of that.
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