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Philip's SFFO 3cm 4Gig Optical Discs
JL writes "New Scientist reports that Philips has a demonstration in Japan recently of a 3cm rewritable optical disc that can store four gigabytes. The drive is small too!"
Interesting that they note that 4 gigs can store 5 2 hour movies on the thing :)
can they fit it on one? would be nifty.. !
seriously, though. what happens to all those great storage options? it seems to me that every few months someone comes up with a clever technique, but I'm still stuck with 700mb CDr's !
Two years from now the world's smallest optical disc will let your cellphone store five two-hour movies...
OK, I can see a small disk like this being very useful, but WHY does everything have to relate to the cellphone? "You can do this with your cellphone...you can do that with your cellphone."
How about simple things, like actual coverage?
Watching a movie on a 2.5" screen, no matter what the resolution, is simply silly.
i don't mean to be a wet blanket here but announcement like this on slashdot are pretty common, and most of the time it takes a few years or so for the product to become widely available. more often than not, due to bad marketing decisions or various other reasons, the product doesn't even see the light of day.
yea i know its nice to read about it and the article says 2 years more, but that's what they say all the time. rewritable DVDs were such a hot topic once but when they actually came out all the different formats and standards adopted by the different companies made it pretty much unsuited to mass-market adoption, not to mention the price of the drives themselves, though those have dropped a bit since.
speaking of drives, the article mentioned the cost of the discs, but not the cost of the players themselves. the discs might be dirt cheap after a while, but are the drives going to cost too much for the average consumer to afford? and should it be cheap enough to be competitive with DVDs and HDTV will this get any opposition from rival companies who may view this as a threat to their products?
Wayne Fletcher at Philips's Southampton lab says SFFO will be ready for sale in two years. Chris Buma, who heads Philips's optical division at Eindhoven in the Netherlands, says discs can be made for "a few cents". The drives will initially cost around £70 but this is expected to fall.
I wonder how this price compares to costs to produce a DVD.
This thing belongs inside a digital video camera. I mean, all that work on jitter resistance must have some point....
We already have this capacity: (re)writable DVDs. So the main compelling advantage must come from the size and maybe energy usage.
It is small, but Flash memory is even smaller. Let's say the drive will be commercially available in 1 year (and then I think I'm being optimistic.) By that time flash storage will already start to come close to these capacities. For instance, the successor of the proprietary Sony Memorystick and XD card technologies by Fuji and Olympus can go up to 8 GB. Flash is technically superior to optical storage (no moving parts, less energy consumption) but optical storage is far cheaper. But most people would store their flash memory on their harddisks anyway.
My karma ran over your dogma
"The first versions of the disc will store one gigabyte on each side, but the dual-layer coating already used for DVDs will double the capacity to four gigabytes in total."
Hmm. x + x = 4x ? Err....
I know I'm looking forward to this new tech. Same with the holographic storage, and the other 200 new media ideas/developments which we never end up seeing, or never par up as first announced anyway. *sigh* Please let this one come through? Please?
Informatus Technologicus
1.
Please make different sizes of media that use the same format, E.G. 3cm, 12cm, 30cm.
Portable equipment can support just the smallest disc size.
Consumer equipment can support the small and middle disc sizes.
Industrial equipment can support the large discs, for things like medical applications where you need uncompressed HDTV, etc.
2.
Please encourage use of all sizes - I have loads of CD-singles that are on 12cm media, not the 3cm media. If only they were all on 3cm media, I could have a pocket-sized discman!
3.
Please consider the possibility of, for example, 12cm media, with a push-out 3cm disc in the centre, that contains the first track, (for audio applications, for example), so that you can buy an album, and play the single on your portable player.
You should see the screwdriver he designed...
Otherwise known as the "stripinator". Robertson's is clearly superior.
I'm still waiting for something which can replace floppy disks. Will this do it?
:)
Think about it. Nothing is really as useful and standard as the floppy. Easy use, always works, no special drivers, no monopoly.
Will this drive form a new standard? I hope so, but I suspect it will do as Zip drives and the rest. If Phillips probably keeps the standard locked down like the Zip drives, then it will just be another useless Zip drive.
Nice little thing, I hope it makes it
-Rene
Got some nano-dust on my cd...gotta clean it...