Canon Zoom Demand

Professional Disc (PFD) is a recordable optical disc format introduced by Sony in 2003 primarily for its new tapeless recording system, XDCAM. It was one of the first optical formats to utilize blue-violet laser, which allowed for higher density of data to be stored on optical media compared to infrared laser technology used in the CD and red laser technology used in the DVD format. PFD uses a 405nm wavelength and a numerical aperture (NA) of 0.85 for the laser, allowing 23Gb of data to be stored on one 12cm disc – the equivalent to nearly five single-layer DVDs, and a 1x speed data transfer rate of 88 M/bits for reading and 72 Mbit/s for writing. Since the 23GB disc was released a dual-layer 50 GB has been developed and been released. Confusingly, this sounds very similar to the Blu-Ray format, another optical disc format using blue-violet lasers which is also supported by Sony. Even the PFD's caddy and Blu-ray's bk prototype caddy (later it was dropped) looked very similar. The only apparent difference is that single-layer PFD discs have a capacity of 23 GB whereas Blu-rays can store 25 GB. However, Blu-ray Discs currently allows a 2x data transfer rate of 72 Mbit/s – lower than PFD. This is because PFD discs use much higher quality media and drives use higher quality components, making them prohibitively expensive for the average consumer segment to which Blu-ray Discs are aimed.