A meeting held in Tokyo, this week, has offered some insight into Sony's plans for the DVD drive of the PS3. The meeting was held in order to decide the final specifications of a read-only Blu-Ray system and present were the big boys of the electronics industry, including Sony.

Blu-Ray is considered by many to be the next step in DVD technology as its use of a blue laser, to read and write data, provides increased accuracy when compared to the red laser currently used. In addition a single layer Blu-Ray disc will hold up to 27 Gb of data. Blu-Ray discs, until now, have been readable and writeable.

Sony has confirmed that it will utilize Blu-Ray on PS3, allowing the device to playback High Definition movies and giving developers more room to create next-generation games. Blu-Ray is backward compatible, so the drive is expected to handle standard DVD movies and PS2 games without causing the PS3 any problems.

Stand-alone Blu-Ray units are expected to launch by early 2005 and movies will migrate to the new format, gradually, over the next few years, so PS3 will be armed with a state of the art drive. Even though plans call for a 23 Gb capacity drive for PS3, it will still hold 5 times more data than current DVD discs.