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Philip's SFFO 3cm 4Gig Optical Discs

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the can-i-use-it-in-vending-machines dept.

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 :)

14 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Units of Storage by Mignon · · Score: 5, Funny
    Interesting that they note that 4 gigs can store 5 2 hour movies on the thing :)

    Indeed. How many Libraries of Congress is that, anyway?

  2. Pics by thebudda · · Score: 5, Informative

    found a Japanese site with pics http://www.zdnet.co.jp/news/0210/04/nj00_sffo.html

    1. Re:Pics by Alsee · · Score: 5, Informative

      Direct links to large version of images.

      3 cm discs and cases, CDs show scale. They are tiny!

      Close-up of drives.

      -

      --
      - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
  3. hm by dusanv · · Score: 5, Funny

    Philip's SFFO 3cm 4Gig Optical Discs

    That Philip is a mighty smart guy. I wish I could make optical discs.

    1. Re:hm by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Funny

      You should see the screwdriver he designed...

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  4. Obligatory pr0n reference by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    2G of pr0n in 3cm! Wow, that's smaller than my... oh, never mind.

  5. Ah, I see... by Jugalator · · Score: 5, Informative

    First versions of the disc will be:

    a) Ready for sale in two years.
    b) Store only 1 Gb.
    c) Expected to cost £70 / drive.

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
  6. WHY? by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:WHY? by 91degrees · · Score: 5, Interesting

      WHY does everything have to relate to the cellphone?

      Well, most of the world has pretty good coverage. The US is the exception largely due to its vast size, but this means that unusually for a piece of technology, the US market is considered secondary. Hence, so is increasing coverage.

      The rest of the world is running out of things that cellphone companies can use to convince us to buy a new phone. It's stupid, but it serves as a quick easy application for marketing types.

      Watching a movie on a 2.5" screen, no matter what the resolution, is simply silly

      It would be pretty cool if they could build a decent screen into a pair of glasses though. Then the portability of something this size would be a definite benifit.

  7. nice tech but when will it be available? by chamenos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  8. Isn't it obvious? by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This thing belongs inside a digital video camera. I mean, all that work on jitter resistance must have some point....

  9. Side benefit... by silverhalide · · Score: 5, Interesting

    First thought when I saw this was "oh yay, another format to buy, with mediocre advantages, namely size". Mini-DVD, meet Mini-disc! Then the thought occured to me, you could theoretically increase your maximum transfer rate off this media by quite a bit over traditional-sized DVD/CD-ROMs, since the diameter is smaller and thus angular inertia is much lower. The disc will have a higher maximum speed and won't explode around 28,000 RPM. Don't feel like hacking out the math, but I'd imagine it'd be signficant.

  10. Agent K by SupahVee · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Here's a nifty little gadget, (holding up small, silver-dollar sized, CD) It's gonna replace CD's soon. Guess I'll have to buy the White ALbum again."

    --
    "See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
  11. Slashdot Units by Cpt_Kirks · · Score: 5, Funny

    Let us put this in the proper context for /.

    The disks will hold *** 10 HOURS OF PORN! ***

    Now, see how simple that is?