UPDATED 28/7/99: Japan's Sanyo Electric Co Ltd , Olympus Optical Co Ltd , and Hitachi Maxell Ltd said on Tuesday they have jointly developed a new high-capacity memory disc for use in next-generation digital cameras.

"The high memory capacity is suitable for taking high definition still pictures and moving pictures for long periods of time,'' a spokesman for Sanyo said.

The new rewritable magneto-optical disc has a memory capacity of 730 megabytes, enabling it to store about 20 times more data than memory devices presently used in its digital cameras, he said.

• The disk is based on AS-MO standards (Magento-Optical), 50mm in diameter
• Cartridge size: 59mm x 56mm x 4.8mm (2.3" x 2.2" x 1/5")
• About ten times the density of Compact Disc, the 730MB disk (4.6Gb/in) is also only 0.6mm thick single board disk.
• Technical: 0.6µm track pitch, 0.235µm shortest mark length (and shortest bit length)
• Ability to store around 1,800 2 megapixel images (400KB a piece) or 20 minutes of 30fps 320 x 240 video (4.8Mps).
• High speed re-writing, between 10Mbps - 50Mbps
• Has a reliability and of over 1,000,000 re-writes
• Very long-term data life (over 100 years)
• Solid cartridge structure and seal
• Sanyo and Olympus are in charge of development of the drive, Hitachi Maxell to develop the disk
• AS-MO standard: The standard was initailly published from the Advanced Storage Technical Conference (ASTC) which comprises of 15 companies, based on a standard where a 120mm disk stored 6GB of data (jointly designed by Olympus, Sanyo, Sharp, Sony and Hitachi).