SANYO Electric Co., Ltd. has developed the high density recording technology "HD-BURN" which doubles the recording capacity to (1.4GB) on conventional CD-R media (700MB). "HD-BURN" will be sequentially employed for our Super Combination Drives. In addition , SANYO has formulated the standard recording format and started product licensing.

CD-R media is rapidly becoming popular because of its reasonable price and superior compatibility, and used by a wide range of users. Currently , recording of large volumes of data such as video are increasing, expanding the popularity of DVD media (4.7GB).The need for intermediate range capacity between CD-R and DVD is steadily increasing as users demand an easy to use and affordable type of large volume media. "HD-BURN" technology meets these needs and realizes the recording of large volume data at a moderate price.

A recorded disc by "HD-BURN" technology is compatible with a DVD player, and allows, the player to read the disc with some modification of firmware.
SANYO Electric Co., Ltd. will disclose the technology used to read the media recorded with "HD-BURN" technology by a DVD player and will propose to other DVD drive makers that they adopt this technology as an industry standard.



More: hxxp://www.sanyo.co.jp/koho/hypertext4-eng/0209news-e/0925-2e.html

I actually heard about this months ago, but I really think it is useless and won't take off. DVD is becoming more mainstream each day and once they decide on a standard, this technology won't matter a bit. Even if they -don't- agree on a standard for DVD, soon drives will support all formats anyway. I think Sony or somebody else is currently coming out with a DVD drive that supports BOTH +RW and -RW formats! Who wants 1.4 when you can get several times that amount?

if the price is a big difference??

yes this was posted/referred to sept. 25th.