Panasonic announced a new line of professional Blu-ray Disc media designed for secure digital data archiving in professional applications. The new recordable Blu-ray Disc (BD-R) will be available in two grades – Archival Grade and Century Archival Grade – with spindle packages in the 2^nd and 3^rd quarter respectively of this year.

Due to Panasonic’s advanced phase change recording technology, the Archival Grade discs have an expected archival life of more than 50 years at a room temperature of 77°F and a relative humidity of 80%. The high durability of Panasonic Blu-ray Discs has been verified by TÜV Rheinland, the world- famous quality and safety certification institution. All archival discs will be inspected and certified to keep the professional quality, ensuring further enhanced durability.

The Century Archival Grade model features a new recording layer structure that ensures longer shelf life. The disc’s recording layers are protected on both sides with newly-developed layers that are extremely close-grained to keep out external materials such as water and dust. The Century Archival Grade Disc has an estimated life of 100 years.

Both Archival and Century Archival discs adopt “Tough Coating”, a double protective layer with hard coat and cover layers for added durability and high elasticity. The new hard coat is designed with a harder material that is more resistant to scratches and fingerprints and offers superior repellency against water and oil. The elastic cover layer material protects against pressure marks. With this optimally balanced “Tough Coating,” the new discs offer greater reliability and easier handling under various conditions for professional use.

Both models will have inkjet printable type and thermal printable type.

Panasonic and Sony have developed a new evaluation technology that has 3D movie and gaming enthusiasts speculating on the future of 3D Blu-ray disc technology. The i-MLSE (Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation) evaluation index will allow Blu-ray media to increase its layer capacity from 25GB to 33.4GB per layer (or up to 66.8GB dual-layer capacity).

Since the increase in layer capacity allows for the continued use of the current Blu-ray laser diodes, a firmware upgrade is, presumably, all that is required for existing Blu-ray Disc players. Meaning, the Blu-ray player you just spent a chunk of change on isn’t obsolete, yet.

As of right now, the increased media capacity is nothing more than an announcement of developed technology. According to Blu-ray.com, there is “no word on when or if the the Blu-ray Disc Association will evaluate the proposed layer capacity increase for inclusion in the Blu-ray spec, but with Sony and Panasonic two of the largest Blu-ray members, it will likely happen sometime later this year.”

Just when you weren’t really sure where the interest in Blu-ray Disc was going, here comes the Pioneer BDR-205 Blu-ray Disc burner, a drive that can burn at speeds of up to 12x–and that’s for both single- and dual-layer BD-R media. (Though, confusingly, the read speed for BD-R and BD-RE tops out at 8x. See the spec sheet on the web site for all of the gory speed details.)

The drive doesn’t skimp on the good specs; it reads and writes pretty much every optical format we can think of offhand (even DVD-RAM), it uses the SATA interface and there’s a 4MB buffer.

The best part? The MSRP is only $249… so street price for this drive will surely be even less. While optical drives have been a commodity item for years at this point, it’s great to see that there’s still some innovation left. But at the same time, prices will only keep going down…