Mitsubishi Chemicals announced the availability of the company's first Blue-Ray disk for video recording (rewritable). The "BR23V1" Blue-Ray disk series will be in the Japanese market by 8th of August, at an estimated retail price of 3500 Yen (approximately 26 EU).

The new media are expected to become the ideal storage solution for High Definition digital contents, for ground or satellite digital broadcasting purposes. As it is well known, the corresponding Blue-Ray recorders use purple-blue laser (short wavelength) allowing recording for high-definition television broadcasting.

The Blue-Ray recorders use the grove recording strategy and write on a 0.32-micrometer track pitch, while the shortest mark length is only 0.16 micrometers. The media use a single recording layer and are also single sided. The Blue-Ray discs have a 12cm diameter and the maximum storage capacity achieved is 23GB, which equals to the capacity of 5 DVD media.

About 2 hours of high definition digital content is possible to be stored while it can also be directly transmitted through high-definition broadcast at a maximum rate of 36 Mbps.

The Mitsubishi Blue-Ray disks are placed in to a special cartridge, protecting the sensitive contents from scratches or dust.

Sony, TDK, and Hitachi Maxell have also announced their Blue-Ray media proposals for high definition recording.