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Sanyo Invents 12X High-Speed Blu-ray Laser
Lucas123 writes "Today Sanyo said it has created a new blue laser diode with the ability to transfer data up to 12 times as fast as previous technologies. The laser, which emits a 450 milliwatt beam — about double that of previous Blu-ray Disc systems — can read and write data on discs with up to four data layers, affording Blu-ray players the ability to store 100GB on a disc, or 8 hours of high-definition video."
If someone wants to do back ups, why not simply buy a 1.5 TB hard drive for ~200 dollars?
I don't see why we need cds anymore...
Isn't that getting into dangerous territory (popping balloons, instant blindness etc)? Recently, high-power laser pointer sales have been banned on eBay and Amazon here in the UK, I'm wondering if similar restrictions might appear for drives like this.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Story states that the drives are 1 to 2 years away. Translation, they have no idea when drives might be on sale, or when 4-layer discs might be available.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
No matter what the technical achivements, in the end you're still hooking it up to one of Sony's defective players. Pass.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Because 50 GB optical media costs less than a dollar to press or burn, and 50 GB of flash memory costs about $100. And hard drives cost a minimum of $30 regardless of their size. Am *I* missing something here?
The entertainment industry still uses optical because it costs them only pennies to press optical media. Relatively speaking, it would cost them a lot more to distribute hard drives and flash memories that came pre-loaded with something I could watch or listen to.
For the average consumer, it's easier to stick a CD inside your car for music, assuming your vehicle has a CD player. Most cars do not have an auxiliary port, iPod jack, or USB slot. Only cars that have been made in the last few years might actually come with these options. Keep in mind, I'm speaking as someone that lives in the U.S., I'm not sure how different the options are in other countries.
Most computers and television sets still do not have built-in flash memory card readers. So other than USB sticks, having CF, xD, MMC, or any of those other formats might be useless if your destination cannot support it.
I think the issue isn't really the media format, but the availability of something that would support such formats. I would prefer flash memory over optical, simply because of its ease of use. And perhaps my perception of time is different, but to me it has always been faster to write to flash than to optical.
Best "String" Ever!
Audio data doesn't necessarily mean MP3s. Storing your audio in a lossless format like FLAC means about 50% compression, so we're looking at ~250MB/album - 400 albums isn't especially unreasonable.
But who says the data has to be written all at once? I assume BD-R supports multi-session writing like other optical media do - ie. you can incrementally add sets of archive data to the disc so long as you don't "close" it.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I have a gut feeling everyone's talking at cross purposes.
At this point, distributing the same 50Gb of content to 100,000 people is probably most cheaply done with Blu-ray as long as those 100,000 people are also going to get many, many, many 50Gb-of-content packages in the same format from numerous other sources. So, as a movie distribution technology, optical media kind of works.
This works because it's cost effective for those 100,000 people to spend $200ish on a Blu-ray disk reader, and it's cost effective to get a duplicator to press 100,000 Blu-ray discs at approximately $2.50 per disc.
However, when you start reducing the numbers on either side, the price differentials start to radically change. It's cheaper for me to put the content on a cheap USB hard drive, even at $100 a pop, if I'm just distributing to a few tens of people, who aren't planning on obtaining Blu-ray readers. And it's even cheaper for me to burn the same content to DVD-R, given a dual layer DVD-R costs around $2, whereas a dual-layer BD-E costs around $15-20 - they're getting close per gigabyte, but the cost of obtaining Blu-ray burners, and the receiver of the data obtaining Blu-ray readers obviously changes the cost effectiveness of the whole thing.
Ok, so that's the current situation. Now let's look at the situation in three years.
Flash memory is coming down in price. Less than a year ago, I bought an 8Gb SD card for around $80. Four months later, I bought a 16Gb SD card for $80. A quick Amazon search shows that while 32Gb cards seem to still be relatively expensive, 16Gb is easily available for around $32. The cost of adding an SD card reader to a computer is around $1. No, I'm serious. They're actually giving away the readers with many cards now. So we're looking at flash memory gigabytes-per-dollar ratios doubling every three to six months. 50Gb for under $20 (BD-RE price) should be... well, that's about $90 now, so that's about a year and a half away, assuming a six month (being conservative) pricing half-life. Another year and a half, and, well, we're looking at 50Gb of flash costing less than 50Gb of pressed Blu-ray media does today. Actually, we're more likely looking at 128Gb SD cards costing $10.
So the optical naysayers are probably right in the long term.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Not that there isn't a lot of truth to what you say but... The subject of this article, as well as key factor to deciding on Flash memory's fate, is SPEED. Cheap flash can read/write at 5-10 MB/s, whereas this new Blu-Ray laser has a stated read/write speed of 170 MB/sec. So, "cheap" Flash has a ways to go before it's competitive with optical media in strictly read/write performance, which for HD video is of utmost importance. The cost/benefit ratio changes for other purposes, but when speed is on the line it's disc or hard drive, flash just isn't there yet.
Let's send some messages into the future, for one!
Sending messages to the future is trivial: Put 'em in a box.
If you can break the speed of light you can send 'em to the past. THAT's more useful.
Even if it only goes a little way. For instance: We could show the congresscritters that passing the bailout bill would spread the pain from the mortgage sector and crash the REST of the economy, changing 6 months of "subprime borrowers lose their houses and go back to renting" into "Stock market tanks and we have a decade or two of 'greater depression'."
Wait a minute: We already TOLD them that and they passed it ANYHOW.
Never mind.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well, here's the thing. Does it still need to be "pressed"?
You go into Movieworld (or whatever they're called.) You browse the titles, wander over to the checkout with your selection, buy the movie, and walk out of the store.
The clerk then yells into the back "Customer just bought Hockey Mom President, need a refill."
Some guy at the back inserts an SD card into a writer. An hour later, he checks back, sees the card has been written, pulls Disney's packaging from a sealed envelope, inserts that into the transparent outer lining of the case and puts the SD card into the case itself, walks out, and puts it on the pile of "Hockey Mom President" boxes.
Disney loved it. They just needed to print the packaging and ship a hundred copies sealed to various movie stores together with a single SD card containing the master.
The movie store loves it. All they need to have in stock at any time is a big pile of blanks - blank cases, blank SD cards - plus the (easily storeable) packaging Disney et al sent. The day before a major release they do, of course, have to prefill a bunch of SD cards, but SD card writers are $1 each, so their computer can make 64 copies at a time without breaking a sweat. Oh, and if they don't sell 64 copies, they can always recycle the cards.
The only loser in the entire scenario is the idiot who bought an awful and highly improbable movie about a dimwitted soccer mom who managed to become a Governor before being picked as a Vice President by a doddering-old politician with stage-three cancer.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Let alone the extended edition
Does it bother you that corporate boards are pledging allegiance to John McCain? Does it bother you that they've promised to escalate the class war if he is elected? Does it bother you that his policies looks very similar to those of George W Bush, who crippled America's economy and induced famine by starting a war in the middle east and giving the profits to his corporate buddies?
I've never heard of this tech, but the most optimistic lifespan of a CD-RW is 25 years, and in practice they usually die in less than 10 years. So if it uses the "same glass substrate that's used on re-writable optical media", then it's still not suitable for long-term storage.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.