Holographic Discs

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8370

Seems promising!

 

Yeah, as it implies in the article, this technology has been "five years away" for over 40 years. I'll definitely be happy if they've made it a viable technology, and if they can meet or beat the lifespan of the media for dvds (which I've heard can range anywhere from 3 to 10 years), then it'll definitely be a step up. I wonder about devices that will be able to write to this, though? Seems like pretty complicated tech, would it be possible to make it affordable for consumers? Blu-ray and HDDVD writers shouldn't be much more complicated than regular dvd writers, since they're only using blue light instead of red to get the bits to stick, but splitting a laser and precisely directing the seperate beams to where they're supposed to go on a crystal seems quite a bit more difficult.

 

similar tech is already being used in dual layer dvds,at any point they could just add another layer to the dual layer dvds if we needed more space, releasing this in the next ten years would skip all the multiple layer dvd's they want to sell us and cost them money which is why I dont think we will see it anytime soon just IMHO

how cool would it be though storing stuff on peices of perspex

As my day always says "Drip fed technology"

 

Thing is just one more layer is harder than it sounds. Dual layer was already a big challenge. Getting a material that allows you to read on it and read through it without interfering too much with the signal behind was difficult to achieve.

To add an extra layer again you'd need an entirely new material which would let the light go through it at least 4 times and still have a high enough intensity to be read accurately by standard DVD light sensors.

The whole metalic foil sandwiched in plastic thing is old. You could say grandfathered. Much like the x86 architechture. We're limiting ourselves needlessly - technologically anyway - we've got technology to make entirely new storage devices, and we don't use them for "backward compatibility" reasons.

It's like writing a childrens book, then turning it into a teenagers book but still using small words so the younger children can still understand it. It's frivolous .

 

Good point,another thing I dont see why we cant go back to are double sided disks,I think I'v seen some floating around correct me if I'm wrong I think it was the whole lord of the rings DVD set that comes on dual layer double sided disks 'I'm too tired to start checking through google ' 18 gigs of storage space on one disk,with the current price of ordinary dual layer disks around £2.00 for one write once disk the cost of a double sided disk would be much more and also make them non economic

 

Sounds impressive, but do we really need to use disks with all that space on it? What the hell would you put on a disk that big and make it worth while?

 

PC Gamer distributes double sided DVDs (single layer, admitadley) with their magazine. There are plenty of double sided media, and they're quite economical (for printing, not consumer writables), BUT they're hard to keep clean. If you've got double the surface area, you're doubling the chance of getting greace onto it... and when the surface area that you pick the thing up with is tiny anyway that makes matters worse!

And what would we do with all that space? Find stuff to fill it. We've found stuff to fill our 200GB hard drives with, the same will apply with these. Though content publishers will be quite hard pushed to get enough media for release to make these worthwhile. Already costs for movie production are going up due to DVDs - you've got to make all the "special features" and author them. If you've got even more content to fill up your holographic disc, you're going to need even more time to author it.

With that ammount of data, you could have a webcam in the producers office and have it run through the entire production of the movie from start to finish... in real time!

 

That seems pretty cool, looking forward too it

 

HD content, I suspect.

 

True, but I don't think the general public would be able to fill up a disk that size and make it worthwhile. People in the computer industry will certainly be able to make good use of the disks. I have no idea what I'd put on one of those disks to fill it up.

Do you think they will make them RW too?

 

I think it will probably follow the same trend as most other media has so far. It'll be a few thousand dollars to buy a writable drive at first, within a few years it'll be down in the hundreds. A lot of people said the same thing about not being able to fill up an entire dvd with content too, when they first came out. I mean, 4.7 GB used to be pretty impressive, before that 700MB seemed daunting, and way back when there were people struggling to max out their 1.44MB. So people will definitely find uses for it.

 

That's very true too. I still don't know what I'd put on one of those disks though.