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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."
I thought IBM had done this already.
PDF on Blu-Ray Disk.
Wow, it must write in REALLLLY tiny letters.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
There go my plans for a paperless office.
When I was in college, I could cram 50GB of information on a 3x5 crib sheet by writing really really small.
A paper disk huh?
Sounds like yet another Sony product to wipe our asses with...
Here's a picture of the 25GB disc. It's a little big right now, but once they up the density, I'm sure you'll see it in more consumer products.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Here's the full text, but you can see it by simply copying & pasting the URL into a new tab/browser window:
TOPPAN and Sony Successfully Develop 25GB Paper Disc
Tokyo, Japan, Apr 15, 2004 - (JCN Newswire) - TOPPAN PRINTING CO., LTD (TSE: 7911) and Sony Corporation (TSE: 6758) today announce the successful development of a 25GB paper disc based on Blu-ray Disc technology. Details will be announced at the Optical Data Storage 2004 conference to be held from April 18th to April 21st at Monterey, California.
Using the disc-structure of Blu-ray Disc technology, the new paper disc has a total weight that is 51% paper. The two companies jointly began this optical disc project approximately a year ago. Blu-ray Disc is commonly known for allowing more than 2 hours of high-definition program recording.
Hideaki Kawai, Managing Director, Head of Corporate R&D Division, TOPPAN CO., LTD commented: "Using printing technology on paper allows a high level of artistic label printing on the optical disc. Since a paper disc can be cut by scissors easily, it is simple to preserve data security when disposing of the disc".
Masanobu Yamamoto, Senior General Manager of Optical System Development Gp., Optical Disc Development Div., Sony Corporation said: "Since the Blu-ray Disc does not require laser light to travel through the substrate, we were able to develop this paper disc. By increasing the capacity of the disc we can decrease the amount of raw material used per unit of information."
The worldwide production of optical discs is approximately 20 billion per year and optical discs are being adopted widely. The combination of paper material and printing technology is also expected to lead to a reduction in cost per disc and will expand usage.
TOPPAN and Sony will continue development of the disc for practical use.
About Sony Corporation
Sony Corporation (TSE: 6758) is a leading manufacturer of audio, video, game, communications, key device and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets. With its music, pictures, computer entertainment and on-line businesses, Sony is uniquely positioned to be the leading personal broadband entertainment company in the world. Sony recorded consolidated annual sales of approximately $62 billion for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2003. For further information, please visit the Sony Corporation home page at: www.sony.net/
About Toppan Printing Co Ltd.
Toppan Printing Co., Ltd. (TSE: 7911), since its founding in 1900, has played key roles in worldwide leadership of the printing industry, generated global acclaim and US$10 billion in revenues. Today, the Company's operations extend beyond conventional lines of printing and show strong performances in each field, including securities and cards, commercial printing, publications printing, packaging, industrial materials,and electronics. Especially in the electronics field, Toppan boasts the largest share of the world market for liquid-crystal color filters. For further information, please visit the Toppan Printing Co Ltd. home page at: www.toppan.co.jp/english/
Contact:
Sony Corporation
Gerald Cavanagh
Gerald.Cavanagh@jp.sony.com
Tel: +81-3-5448-2200; Fax: +81-3-5448-3061
It's a moot issue anyways... DVD's go through the office paper shredder just fine... the crosscut here that handles 10 sheets at a time destroys CD's and DVD's on a regular basis.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Seems like they would be very easy to damage.
Not by rocks though. Paper kicks rocks ass till both boots are shitty.
Imagine what this could do for the rental business. Now, I'm not about to get rid of my DVDs, and I hope they don't stop selling them: I rather like "owning" a movie I can play whenever Iike.
But getting on an airplane, and instead of "renting" a movie, I just but the cheap $2.00 one. This is what DiVX could have been without the annoying DRM and phone calling back method.
If I want to try out a game, such as "Jak and Daxter 14: Goatees for Everybody", I could get the cheap $5 full version paper demo, try it out, and when the disk finally breaks down say "Well, I can either buy another $5 version and finish the game, or pay $30 for the full version".
Either way, Sony doesn't come across looking evil, and I get what I want.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
From the article:
The worldwide production of optical discs is approximately 20 billion per year and optical discs are being adopted widely.
What is it minus AOL?
Extending this thread, it's too bad Sony didn't work on this with P The "Bounty" version of the AOL disk could pre-emptively clean up those annoying coffee drips and the "Charmin" version, well the AOL disks would finally actually be useful.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Awesome! One third of the way there.
Now all we need is a Rock based disk and a Scissors based disk. Then have them fight it out for world dominance.
"good old rock, nothing beats rock!"
no
I'm reminded of the old Commodore 1541 5.25" floppy disk drive, that could format a paper plate without errors.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
>since a paper disc can be cut by scissors easily,
Yep. Scissors cut paper disc, paper disc cuts fingers, fingers bleed on scissors, causing them to rust.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
So Dilbert was right, smaller fonts can save on disk space.
So will we still call them CD burners? It'll be like Farenheit 451. CD burners will be used to destroy data and some of us will remember when CD burners actually wrote data.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
If they can solve the problem of data loss from folding a disk. (I guess it can be done using massive redundancy).
We can send share data by throwing paper air planes at each other.
How cool is that?
Now my new set of AOL coasters will be absorbant!
after Sony releases the new College-ruled version.
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.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
We can now put information down on paper!!!
Just think of what we can do now!
You could like....put a whole book or something on it!
Nah...that'll never work.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
On a side note - man, the Japanese are really good at making things out of wood and paper, aren't they?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
exactly how long will this paper last before it starts decomposing in some way?
Paper doesn't really decompose unless it's subjected to bacteria, air, water, dirt and stuff.
High quality paper, such as wood-free paper doesn't even yellow much in sunlight.
(Wood-free? You say.. that's paper which is 100% cellulose, with no lignin in it.. lignin is the stuff that separates trees from plants.. without lignin, it's not wood, hence 'wood-free' paper.)
In a good environment (as one could expect for this kind of purpose) paper should have a far greater life-span than any hard drive I've ever owned.
(and I've held on to some of mine for quite some time)
it's not the cost of the recording media that makes movies and music expensive, otherwise CDs would've come down in price like the industry promised (ha!) when the technology first came out.
if it was possible, you could come up with digital video disks made from cow chips, and they would still charge the same price for a movie.
Sony may be on to something here. Imagine encoding information onto the paper using some sort of symbol system that humans could be taught to interpret just by looking at the sheets? No computer necessary?
Sheets of paper encoded like this could be cut square (most efficient use of space) and then bound by the edge so datasets larger than one-sheet's-worth could be looked at in a sequential fashion.
These things are likely to be kind of bulky; if it ever takes off, there might be public buildings where people could borrow from a large repository of these paper-encoded datasets.
This is kind of mind-boggling; it is likely to be years before Sony or anyone else takes it to this next step.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Hey, is that a spam server I see?
.. *swallow* !!
Not any more..
*eject*
One of the most popular variations [of Rock, Paper, Scissors] is called "Cat, Microwave, Tinfoil". Cat beats tinfoil by ripping it up, tinfoil beats microwave by starting a fire, and microwave beats cat by cooking it. This version was created because, to the creators of Cat Microwave Tinfoil, it doesn't make sense that paper beats rock by covering it (as it doesn't damage the rock, while on the other hand it can destroy the paper by tearing it). [from Wikipedia]
Hey won't it be nice to roll a fat one with a longhorn logo on it.
Got Code?
No. They'll call it "two-ply".
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
is it just me or does this bring a whole new meaning to 'burning a disc'?
sorry for that, i couldn't resist.
Moo.
How about a mobius strip
And if you go for something a bit snazzier printer wise like the Epson Color Proofer 7600 you get:
... you have a scanner?"
2880 dpi is 2880x2880 dots per sqaure inch
You have 8.5 x 11 square inches (or pi * 2^2 for a cd sized area)
You have 7 individual colors so lets count a dot for each, and lets go with no error correction (just to get a maximum conceivable).
You end up with 14M / square inch, a big improvement over 9k!
That would give you 1.3G / double sided page, or 182M / double sided cd size.
So Sony's tech here is nearly as big a leap up again as from 300x300dpi@1bit to 2880x2880dpi@7bit! It's a long way from printing quality (forget the fact that you would need to be incredibly redundant to make it any use, forget 10 bit bytes, i'd be thinking 64 bit bytes if it's meant to be lossless storage on the scheme I outlined). Might be fun to try and print out and scan back in say a knoppix cd in as few pages as possible, "what you mean you don't have a cd drive
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Has anyone posted an item recently on the latest audio encoding advances which make it difficult to make digital copies?
The music industry is working on a new type of CD. It is not that compact, actually: I am guessing that the "medium pizza" size is to make it difficult to actually steal from music stores.
The discs are black, and instead of being encoded with laser-readable bits, the surface is covered with one very long spiralled indentation (or groove). Information engraved in this indentation can be read through a tiny stylus and converted into sound.
To further thwart the digital p2p "rip and post it on Kazaa" world, the audio technology is actually analog instead of digital.
The technology required to burn these things is rather bulky and expensive. Prototypes have been produced by a new audio company called "Decca" (Digital Encoding Concern Company - Advanced), some of the prototypes have turned up at garage sales. These are typically stamped with very old dates (1938? 1941?) to confuse people.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Wait, isn't that the same... Oops, I forgot! I said Music Industry.
I meant that now AOL can reduce the price of their CDs.
more like AOL toilet paper
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
but it doesn't record to paper plates
My wording could have been more clear. The 1541 ACTED like it formatted a paper plate. You'd have to cut the plate, or other piece of cardboard to size, place it in the drive, and then run the format operation. This would proceed and conclude with no error message. This does not mean that the resulting paper disc was ready for Commodore data storage!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
When I was in 5th grade, I used a similar trick for a test in which we had to name all the states and their capitals. Rather than spend 4 weeks memorizing those useless facts, I simply wrote them on my pencil in the format of "Sacramento, California" = "SAC-CA". My prototype pencil turned out to be too obvious, though, so I then created a modified alphabet that only I could read. I probably spent more time refining that alphabet than it would have taken me to memorize the stupid state capitals, but in the end the alphabet was a better investment. I was for years able to use it as a "plain sight" type cheat-sheet font, whereby I could write out names, dates, or other mnemonic reminders on (say) the paper cover of a history book and leave it in plain sight next to my desk. To anyone else it looked like meaningless scratchings. I managed to get through YEARS of school without having to learn anything! ;)
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.