Verbatim Corporation announced today that it has begun shipping engineering samples of its new 4x DVD-R Dual Layer (DL) media to DVD burner manufacturers and their software suppliers for read/write and compatibility testing.

Shipments for consumers will begin late in Q1 2005, after the official specification is finalized. The specification enables the new DL-compatible burners to write a complete 8.5GB Verbatim dual layer DVD-R disc in about 25 minutes.

Verbatim and its parent company, Mitsubishi Kagaku Media (MKM), were among the first to confirm the technical feasibility of 4x speed recording of dual layer DVD-R media. To ensure high performance without sacrificing reliability or compatibility, Verbatim and MKM developed unique dye materials and coating techniques, as well as manufacturing techniques for stamping the grooves into the media that guide the write and read processes. Broad compatibility is maintained by using a thin layer silver alloy that serves as a reflector in the upper layer. The technologies developed by Verbatim/MKM allow the laser beam to pass through the first layer and the reflective layers to write to the second layer. The result is consistently reliable write/read performance for each layer.

By offering two recording layers, Verbatim’s new 4x DVD-R DL discs provide a capacity increase of about 80 percent, compared to the 4.7GB DVD-R media. With the higher capacity, consumers will be able to store up to 4 hours of DVD-quality video (16 hours of VHS-quality video) or 8.5GB of data on a single side while maintaining compatibility with the majority of today’s DVD players, recorders, drives and burners.