Optical drives will hit the next generation next year when Sony will be proud to present its CD/DVD/Blu-Ray combination drive. Armed with a conventional red laser for your entire legacy CD and DVD burning needs, the additional blue laser (God, this is sexy!) will cater for burning the super high capacity Blu-Ray disks.

"Blu-Ray is coming. It's a logical step: CDs were created for music, DVDs for video and with high definition video you'll need the capacity Blu-Ray offers." - Matthew Swinney, product manager at Sony.

Blu-Ray disks will debut with capacities of 25GB, which will slowly rise as more layers are added, to finally reach a staggering 200GB.

Companies that manufacture recordable media such as blank CDs and DVDs are already posed to support the format, but have given equal attention to rival format HD DVD, the brainchild of Toshiba. That format has already been revealed to have reached a healthy 45GB, clearly giving it the initial edge in storage capacity.