Sony Announce new tape technology

[Brian Drysdale]

Sony has developed a new high density tape using a nano-grained magnetic layer.

Sony Global - Sony develops magnetic tape technology with the world's highest^*1 areal recording density of 148 Gb/in²

[Bruce Watson]

Originally Posted by Brian Drysdale

Sony has developed a new high density tape using a nano-grained magnetic layer.

Just because it's Sony doesn't mean it's aimed at video. It's almost certainly aimed at the IT data storage market. Notice that IBM is their partner here. You aren't likely going to see this technology in a camcorder.

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Bruce Watson

You aren't likely going to see this technology in a camcorder.

No, but they make several references to LTO6 in that article, and whilst I don't expect to see LTO tapes in cameras, such are heavily used in the video industry (as well as general IT) for longer term video storage, such as archiving and backing up.

[Brian Drysdale]

Yes, there's a lot of downloading and backups after acquisition. It currently seems to be a case of flash memory on the camera and using other means of storage afterwards, especially since backup copies are also required.

[Gary Nattrass]

Always interesting when Sony develop a tape format as they tend to get long term cross technology use out of them.

Betamax became, betacam and digital betacam and the DAT format became DV, Hi 8 was used as part of the Exabyte back-up system around 20 years ago so it will be interesting to see where this goes as there is still a need for tape based archive and back-up for news and doco production.

Maybe a hybrid 4k or 8k system could be a possibility ala the Z7 for HDV ?

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Gary Nattrass

Always interesting when Sony develop a tape format as they tend to get long term cross technology use out of them.

I think it's worth making it clear that the article is talking about a new tape TECHNOLOGY (to get more bits/sq mm) in general - not a format as such.

It may therefore be that this technology actually sees light of day in a future extension of the LTO standard?

In general, Gary's quite right about Sony generally having thought long term about historic formats (at least in the pro world!) - not just abandoning a format when something new comes along. Hence current Digibeta decks will play all the previous SD Beta formats as well - from SX, through SP right back to oxide Betacam. And HDCAM SR decks will play basic HDCAM and Digibeta.

[Alister Chapman]

Very much doubt we will ever see Sony put tape in a camera again. While the capacity of IT tape goes up, the write speeds still lag way behind solid state.

I don't think there was any relationship between DAT and DV. DAT used 4mm tape in a housing similar to audio dictation cassettes while DV used 6.35mm tape. Sony's Digital8 used High8 8mm video tapes with DV digital encoding.