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Sony Develops 25 GB Paper Disc
jaaron writes "TOPPAN Printing and Sony today announce the successful development of a 25GB paper disc based on Blu-ray Disc technology. Yes, that's right, *paper*. Details will be announced at the Optical Data Storage 2004 conference to be held from April 18th to April 21st at Monterey, California."
exactly how long will this paper last before it starts decomposing in some way?
Its not that hard.
300 dpi is 300x300 dots per square inch.
You have 8.5 x 11 square inches.
That means you have 300x300x8.5x11 dots per page.
What's your encoding mecanism?
If you forget error detector and recovery, divide by 8 and you have byte. Divide by 1024 and you have real kilobytes, then by 1024 and you have real MB, (but given that we are trying to sell thing scheme, divide it by 1,000 and 1,000,000 respectively to give Marketing Bytes).
Given the low quality of the media, I'd be inclined to use 10bit bytes to allow double bit error detection and single bit error recovery. This also makes the maths easier.
So you end up with 300x300/10 = 9000 bytes = 9k per square inch, and 840k per page. Make a double sided version and yo have nearly 1.7MB.
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So is this good or bad for the environment? Can these disks be recycled? Can they be made from recycled paper? Do they contribute less to landfills, or do they result in more trees getting chopped?
I'm honestly having trouble coming up with a practical application for this. I RTFA and learned (I think) that they're using "DVD-like" technology, but that the substrate is (51% by weight) paper, not acrylic and aluminum. The advantage? "It's easier to cut with scissors," states the article.
What possible benefit does this present. Someone help me out.
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So I could make copies at Kinkos?
Fritz
_______
Huh?
Apparently, there's an official industry consortium for the technology, with the list of on-board companies including Dell, HP, Hitachi, Pioneer, Sony, and many more. I also found this short intro on the underlying technology, which explains:
Large recording capacity up to 27GB:
By adopting a 405nm blue-violet semiconductor laser, with a 0.85NA field lens and a 0.1mm optical transmittance protection disc layer structure, it can record up to 27GB video data on a single sided 12cm phase change disc. It can record over 2 hours of digital high definition video and more than 13 hours of standard TV broadcasting (VHS/standard definition picture quality, 3.8Mbps)
The specs are no different than current tungsten foil discs, and I don't see how a paper media layer is going to be any more prone to damage than the ultra-thin foil we currently use. Have you ever tried peeling off a CD label that is firmly affixed? good chance you can rip the media right off the plastic.
.6mm pieces of plastic, wouldn't change the thickness of the disc, but at least there would be a bit more protection for the media.
It would be nice if they just sandwiched the media between two
Last year my 30 year old daughter informed me of how much data a 7th grade student could put on the six sides of a new yellow pencil. From a few feet away it looks like it has been chewed on so the teacher asks no questions. Use only three sides and it even stays hidden when you put the pencil down.
If IBM had been able to use this technology, no telling how much data they could have put on paper disks! About 2 gigs along the edge even.
We can now put information down on paper!!!
Just think of what we can do now!
Be careful at what you laugh at.
Data (other than print) has been stored on paper via bar codes. Some early programmable calculators (notably hp) used this to store programs.
Then came the SoftStrip, a kind of 2d barcode that could store higher densities of data. It was used primarily by magazines in the late eighties to print programs that you could scan into your computer (most likely an apple II) rather than laboriously typing them in, which was fraught with errors. A couple of magazines that this appeared in was Nibble and Byte.
But this was not economical for large programs (as it competed with advertising space), and it never achieved widespread popularity.
But the idea was just too clever to die, and other applications of this idea have appeared along with imitators.
The most readily available example of this idea being used is postage printing, that seems to now be widespread.
This technology will always be cheaper than RFIDs, magnetic strips, and smartcards.
As an aside, the benefit of this paper disc that Sony invented is going to be the cost of the media. This is the primary reason Dataplay discs were not able to get off the ground. With the media being inexpensive and a company like Sony to boost it in their applications, I suspect that this could become popular.
One last thing - don't forget that the first technique of storing data on paper other than writing and pictures would be the thumbprint.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"