Today Sony in partnership with Tohoku University announced they have developed a new laser technology that will allow them to encode discs with twenty five times the data of any standard Blu-ray disc, with a total capacity of 1TB on a single disc.

The all-semiconductor laser technology uses a extremely condensed wavelength of 405 nanometers and generates high-powered optical pulses at three picoseconds (three-trillionths of a second). The nitty gritty technical details aside, this ultimately could mean big things for a next generation disc format, particular for high definition films and television and gaming.

While Sony did not announce any clear cut plans for the technology in terms of implementation on a consumer level, they did note that there are "high expectations" for the new laser system and that it could be particularly valuable in reducing the size of devices due to it's smaller light source.

All things considered, it seems fairly obvious that it will be years before this technology becomes commercially available, let alone adopted as a standard, but when the time comes it could lead to some pretty interesting developments in high-fidelity, high-capacity disc-based media.

1 terabit = 1012 bits = 1,000,000,000,000 bits (one trillion, or, using the long scale, one billion). 1 terabit is equal to 1,000 (decimal) gigabits and a tebibit to 1,024 (binary) gibibits. 1 terabit is also equal to 125 gigabytes.