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1 Terabyte Optical Storage Disks
fenimor writes "Physicists at Imperial College London described a new method for potentially encoding and storing up to one Terabyte of data, or 472 hours of film, on one optical disk the size of a CD or DVD. Maybe it won't be as large, as 100TB holographic optical storage, but still should be enough to fit every episode of The Simpsons on one disk. Dr Török, Lecturer in the Department of Physics, believes that the first disks could be on the shelves between 2010 and 2015."
I dont think you can really take a 4k scan for face value. Not even good slrs with very good lenses and the best films available can really get 4k usable resolution on a 35mm film.
And somehow i dont think a film camera doing 24fps can archive the same quality.
Yes, you can scan it with that resolution, but you could scan it with 16k, too. There is just no (or little) more information in your 4k scan than in a 2k scan.
I know you are nitpicking, but you could also claim that 3d is mission, what about ir und uv, ectect.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Well, the article doesn't state that there's a recordable version. Indeed, given that it relies on not just the size, but on fine details of the pits, I could imagine that making a recordable version of that quite hard at the least.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I remember several yars ago reading about a CD Burner that would be able to burn 5.6GBytes onto a regular CD. It used a gray-scale recording like they are talking about only it worked with existing CD-Rs you could buy in the store. Only difference here is they are using the existing DVD technology and a higher order modulation.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Actually, hard drive storage densities are increasing much more quickly than that.
I've been tracking hardware price trends for a few years, and hard drive data densities have increased exponentially, but on a changing exponent.
From the late 1980's to the mid 1990's, the rate was about 1.6x per year. Around 1996 the annual rate of increase climbed to 1.8x, then 2.0x, to a peak of about 2.2x/year until the "dot bomb" around 2001, which knocked it down to 1.4x for a while. It has since climbed back up to about 1.6x/year. (I'm not sure why the dot-bomb had this effect.)
If we assume, naively, that it will continue to increase at a mere 1.6x/year, then we should be seeing 6+ TB hard drives by the year 2010, easily. That is, imho, a conservative estimate.
On the other hand, there are any of a number of things which might change the commodity hard drive market (for instance, the advent of thumbdrives which are "good enough" for the masses, leaving only the corporate market for hard drives). So pop some popcorn and pull up a lawnchair, and we'll see what hapens.
-- TTK