Xbox 360 could get Blu-ray - Sony

A senior Sony executive has claimed Microsoft is in talks about bringing Blu-ray technology to Xbox 360 - but Microsoft says it has no plans to do so.

According to the Financial Times it all started when Stan Glasgow, president of Sony Electronics US, made a speech at a "media dinner". He said Microsoft and Apple are both having a chat with Sony about how they can incorporate Blu-ray tech into their products.

The news comes two weeks after Microsoft's corporate vice president of Live, Software and Services, John Schappert, told Eurogamer that the HD-DVD add-on's poor attach rate - just 3 percent - might dissuade Microsoft from releasing another high-definition disc drive add-on.

We love teh gaymes iz not tru, said Microsoft in a statement. Or more specifically: "We have made no such announcement. Games are what are driving consumers to purchase game consoles and we remain focused on providing the largest library of blockbuster games available." That clears everything up then.

Later in his speech Glasgow said he's not worried about digital downloads overtaking Blu-ray, what with bandwidth limitations and the fact consumers like having discs anyway. "Downloading will build over time, but this will be over a period of years," he observed. He also predicted the cost of Blu-ray players will drop to USD 299 before the end of the year, falling to USD 200 by 2010.

Panasonic says that its 100GB Blu-ray discs will last a century

Panasonic says that its new 4-layer 100GB Blu-ray discs are so durable that you'll be able to retrieve the data in 100 years' time (which reminds us a lot of the claims they originally made about CDs, as one may recall). The company has been at work for the last few years making use of "tellurium suboxide palladium-doped phase-change recording films" (or Te-O-Pd, for those in the know) to improve the capacity of its Blu-ray discs. But the company has now achieved what appears to be the optimal ratio for durability and size: a 100GB disc that will last you a century. Of course, a few months ago Panasonic scientists completed a research paper showing a disc-making technique that kicked that timeframe up to 500 years, but could only hold 50GB of data. So that may indicate that if you have 1GB that you really need to be preserved for the next several thousand years, you may want to get some serious cash together and give Panasonic a ring. Of course, all of these developments assume that firstly in 100 years Blu-ray readers will have won the format war, and secondly, will still be around.