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."

Comments

What's REALLY next for optical?

[swb]

I've learned to completely discount all the "..researchers announce xxx {giga,tera}bytes on a DVD..." stories I've read here, simply because they've never become products or the timeline is so drawn out (2015???) that it's meaningless.

The only products that appear likely to actually hit the market for real are Blu-Ray and its competitor, DVD-HD (which seems kind of dead in the water as a data storage standard due to its limited size and growth). Blu Ray appears to have some legs from what I've read, due to its layer growth capability.

What's after that? Are there any storage standards backed by large consortiums coming after Blu Ray? Or is multi-layer blu ray supposed to be "good enough" until some of this lab stuff makes it to market in 2015?

I'd have to agree.

[WebCowboy]

What a shameful waste of technology. All those flat, vast expanses of yellow skintone and blue hair that are Homer's abdomen and Marge's hair? Anybody who watches the Simpsons ought to recognise how compressible such simple artwork is. Add that to the fact that most TV animation is "shot on twos" so it is largely 12 or 15 frames per second anyways.

Come to think of it, properly compressed one such disk could probably store the complete works of the Simpsons, Futurama AND South Park and have room to spare--without noticeable degredation in picture and sound quality.

Lets use our imaginations--with high-density storage like this, consumer-grade equiment of the future could store amazing virtual worlds right down to the last twig and blade of grass...

Longevity

[Bios_Hakr]

While I'm glad to see advances being made in storage media, I'd prefer to see these guys working to make a '100-year DVD+-R/RW'.

After all, who wants to spend one week a year doing quality assurance on media. And even if you do QA, what if you find something is bad. While you can re-download your warez and pr0n, the photos and videos of your family vacation will be lost forever.