Tokyo (Japan) – Sanyo claims it has the technology foundation for Blu-ray players that can read Blu-ray discs with twice the capacity at twice the speed than average Blu-ray players can today.

The secret behind the technology is a 450 mW pulsed-operation blu-violet laser, which is significantly stronger than the 200 mW lasers that are commonly used in today’s Blu-ray players.  Sanyo claims that the new device can support Blu-ray discs with up to four layers (instead of only two), raising the potential maximum capacity of Blu-ray discs from 50 GB to 100 GB.

Sony previously indicated that Blu-ray may be scalable up to 200 GB.

According to Sanyo, the 450 mW laser also increases the write speed of Blu-ray burners. The speed increases from 6x (216 Mb/s) to 12x (532 Mb/s or 66.5 MB/s), which would mean that a full 100 GB could be filled in about 25 minutes. In fact, a data transfer rate of 66.5 MB/s is competitive or faster than what most hard drives offer.    

Sanyo did not say when the new laser devices could become commercially available.