300GB-1.6TB Holographic Video Discs in '06?

[Yi Fong Yu]

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8370

can you imagine burning an optical disc with uncompressed 1080p films on it? wow! =).

[Mike Tesh]

Can you imagine scratching one.

[Yi Fong Yu]

it's enclosed... like DVDRAM.

[Daymon Hoffman]

I bet they wont happen for 2006... nor 2007... Damn vapour ware :/

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Originally Posted by Daymon Hoffman

I bet they wont happen for 2006... nor 2007... Damn vapour ware :/

It's Maxell announcing this.

Sure its vapor right now, but I don't doubt that it will be released more or less on schedule. That would fit with Maxell's history and reputation.

The thing to note is that they left a LOT of leeway on what exactly that schedule is.

Late 2006 indeed. That could be anywhere from June to 12/31/06.

For the 300GB version mind you...

As far as a 1.6TB version... that's hype for now. But I can assure you it is "coming soon." That would be the normal people kind of soon, not the vaporware kind of soon.

They have a LOT of engineering (note that word!) left to make something that can be mass produced. The images I have seen from Maxell indicate to me that they are fairly far along that path.

I can tell you for a fact that these companies can provide this performance RIGHT NOW, but they are doing it with hand built "prototype" recorders and one off media in labs. (I say for a fact because I have seen the units hard at work!) In other words the physics is finished. They know how to do this.

The biggest obstacle is no longer technology at all, but rather market forces.

Most major manufacturers are still busy fighting a war about an evolutionary DVD successor (Blue Ray vs HD-DVD). I doubt they are going to want to focus on delivering something even better until they have had a chance to milk their current work some.

So- my guess is that we are going to see a rate adoption like CD-ROM in the early 90's for holographic media. Blue-Ray/HD-DVD will see a rate of adoption more like DVD had- especially if Sony makes good and ships Blue Ray with PS3's. (I take that as having greater than 99% probability.)

Still the future is bright- and volumetric!

[Keith Wakeham]

I remember back in the day the advent of Florescent optical technology. Promising all sorts of stuff like discs with incredible storage and credit cards with movies and all in huge capacities. Years latter Holographic storage, based on similiar theory emerged, promising even larger capacities and access speeds.

I was 14 when flourescent optical technology promising 100GB per disc was announced. Over 6 years latter and not a single commercial disc exsists although they said they had working prototypes at the time. By the time they are able to build an infastructure and get these out we will be able to scale our current tech to 100nm lasers or something smaller so its not going to be a big jump when the holographic discs actually get out.

Even if it does come out next year and I happened to be a betting man I'd bet dollars to donuts that it will be more expensive than an autoloading LTO3 setup. I hope I'm wrong, but if not I do like donuts.

[Daymon Hoffman]

Hmm. Well thats all well and good. I reckon its a format that would take off should it come to market. Regardless of the current battle for the 'next gen' "HD DVD" (which to me is a big WOFTAM, especially to consumers) this is the type of technology performance increase we need. I'm sick to death of having short life spans which small increases in performance. Why not just go the whole hog and gives us a decent space increase that'll last a decent while. This is why i see this holographic thing as being great. I WANT it to be here quick.. so that it smashes HD-DVD and Blu-Ray out of the water.

I understand many of the points your make (especially the milking part). But i'm sure that is something the forces behind this would care for... i.e. they want there product out there asap and wont limit it for "political" reasons.

Surely they could put it out there and let the public snap it up?

Its great to here (although i'll remain skeptical. sorry :D) they have the tech figured and its just a matter of refinement etc

NB: Yeah it would suck to lose 300Gb of data... let a lone 1.6Tb. But hey... we dont really need to burn 300Gb to the disks.. do we? :)

[Emre Safak]

To put things into perspective, 1.6TB would hold 147 minutes of 1080p HD (1.485Gbps). Not as much as you would think. Quite like the situation with SD and DVD today (you get about two hour's of material on a single-layer disc).

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Originally Posted by Keith Wakeham

I remember back in the day the advent of Florescent optical technology. Promising all sorts of stuff like discs with incredible storage and credit cards with movies and all in huge capacities. Years latter Holographic storage, based on similiar theory emerged, promising even larger capacities and access speeds.

I was 14 when flourescent optical technology promising 100GB per disc was announced. Over 6 years latter and not a single commercial disc exsists although they said they had working prototypes at the time. By the time they are able to build an infastructure and get these out we will be able to scale our current tech to 100nm lasers or something smaller so its not going to be a big jump when the holographic discs actually get out.

Even if it does come out next year and I happened to be a betting man I'd bet dollars to donuts that it will be more expensive than an autoloading LTO3 setup. I hope I'm wrong, but if not I do like donuts.

"Past performance is not an indicator of future prospects" or however the disclaimer goes.

Ordinarily I would agree- I remember a whole ton of upcoming memory technologies that promised wonders.

The big difference here is that I have actually seen and used a prototype holographic disk. (SWEET) Before whenever I had a chance to actually see some of the vapor "prototypes" what I found is that they were really laboratory experiments.

My favorite was crystalline volumetric memory. Incredible data density because they were actually storing data by manipulating the state of the crystal lattice. If they ever got it working it had a demonstrated capacity to store Exabytes in the volume of a dime. Got to the lab, and it worked- they could demonstrate exactly that sort of data density, but the apparatus gave out after writing a few hundred kilobytes. (1991 or so) We stuck to floppies and that newfangled CD-R thing.

Anyways, now that we are back from memory lane, the difference now is that when I went to the lab this time (different company same basic concepts) they had a few different working prototypes. 500GB (I think) DVD sized disk, a 80 GB postage stamp sized drive and a multi terabyte thing I was suspicious of because only the staff could touch it.

So... I'll mostly take that bet. I figure we'll get another product announcement mid-2006. That will have firmer dates- and within a month of whatever date they give consumers (probably of the deep pocketed variety) will be able to buy them. Adoption rates will be similiar to CD devices

Before you do take the bet though you might want to do a little homework:

This device was demoed at the Maxell booth at NAB 2005
http://www.physorg.com/news3719.html

And it is being used to play commercials to air on some Turner network
http://www.physorg.com/news8617.html

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Originally Posted by Emre Safak

To put things into perspective, 1.6TB would hold 147 minutes of 1080p HD (1.485Gbps). Not as much as you would think. Quite like the situation with SD and DVD today (you get about two hour's of material on a single-layer disc).

Not so much like DVD.

DVD is HIGHLY COMPRESSED SD video.

D1 NTSC is 270Mbps. DVD is a lot less 1.5-10Mbit/s I think, with most movies in the 3-6Mbit/s range. Someone check that.

So, the new disc can store two hours and some change of uncompressed HD ?

The new discs promise 120Mbyte/s, but uncompressed needs 1.485Gbit/s. My guess is that, once you account for bus overhead, it doesn't have the bandwidth to actually playback uncompressed HD in realtime though.

Instead I suppose we could use a format like HDCAM SR. That is 440Mbit/s for video. 600Mbit/s including audio and metadata. That can be set to either 10bit 4:2:2 at 2.7x compression or 10 bit 4:4:4 at 4.2x compression. (Audio and metadata are uncompressed.)

So let me figure that out... about 6 hours of HDCAM SR. (6 hours 12 min, but you have to leave a little room for filesystem overhead etc.) That would be horrible... I could only store all those damned new Star Wars movies in their original acquisition format on one disk. Actually that isn't true. Episode 1 was 35mm. Episode 2 was MERELY HDCAM- only Episode 3 was HDCAM SR.

So, I would actually be storing more data than was recorded for Episode 2. Oh dear.

Seriously if you have ever seen HDCAM SR projected you'll understand that this is more than good enough- its the holy grail of digital video. HDCAM SR on a DLP Cinema projects better than most 35mm projectors you are likely to have seen. (Only the best and best maintained film projectors will do better.)

Of course this all assumes it is a read write format. (Nice how I threw that in there at the last minute.)

[Robert Mann Z.]

disks and drives to ship this year

info
http://www.inphase-technologies.com/...ogy/index.html

tour of technology
http://www.inphase-technologies.com/...our/index.html

press
http://www.inphase-technologies.com/...stry_4000.html

my comments
20 MB/s transfer speed is very slow, prices are not out yet, and it doesn't seem like the first uinit is re-writable

[George Ellis]

Originally Posted by Keith Wakeham

I remember back in the day the advent of Florescent optical technology. Promising all sorts of stuff like discs with incredible storage and credit cards with movies and all in huge capacities. Years latter Holographic storage, based on similiar theory emerged, promising even larger capacities and access speeds.

I was 14 when flourescent optical technology promising 100GB per disc was announced. Over 6 years latter and not a single commercial disc exsists although they said they had working prototypes at the time. By the time they are able to build an infastructure and get these out we will be able to scale our current tech to 100nm lasers or something smaller so its not going to be a big jump when the holographic discs actually get out.

That was Constellation 3D. They burned up a lot a venture capital and had nothing to show for it in the end. Had folks even sign up for licensing, but it died on the vine. One of there first demos was storing data on a roll of clear packing tape.

[Jeff McElroy]

HDCAM SR on a DLP Cinema projects better than most 35mm projectors you are likely to have seen.

I can attest to that. Having seen the 35mm print several times before hand, I traveled many moons to view episode III digitally, and I must say it was visual nirvana.

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Originally Posted by Robert Mann Z.

disks and drives to ship this year

[LINKS EDITED OUT SEE THEM ABOVE]

my comments
20 MB/s transfer speed is very slow, prices are not out yet, and it doesn't seem like the first uinit is re-writable

Well previously I had been posting about the tech's potential, but here let me address the debut product and your criticism...

20Mbytes/sec isn't that fast- until you realize that HDCAM is right in that neighborhood and this greatly exceeds DVCPRO HD.

Sticking with DVCPRO HD (Which is turning out to be my pet HD format.) you'll be able to store over 2 hours on the debut products.

Finally about re-writability: I have noticed that for a LOT of applications I just don't care- as in at all. I am very happy using DVD+/- R and CD-R though all my optical drives certainly handle RW. RW is better of course, but a lot of stuff doesn't really need it. What it calls for is CHEAP MEDIA.

So, I am agreeing that the debut specs aren't jaw droppingly fantastic- but I also want to point out that even a 300GB write once read many 20Mbyte/sec optical drive still solves a LOT of problems in my studio on both SD and HD productions.

So will I buy this ? <shrug> Depends. It has to be cheaper than buying more hard disks (I am willing to bet on this), and I'll have to see that new products are in the pipeline that they are in fact moving towards their product goals, plus I'll want to see additional manufacturers using the technology- competition is critical to lowering costs and advancing the technology. Also- it'll help ease my mind long term if I can get drives/media from a second source.

I also need to see aggressive media pricing and competition. Media can't start higher than $40 per 300GB disc, and needs to VERY QUICKLY drop under $10/disc.

If I see those four things happening I'll buy in- even with the technical limitations we are seeing from debut products. After all I bought into CD back in 1992, and despite the costs that turned out to be a good bet.

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Well, time passes, and we can see the results in practice.

Inphase is selling the 300GB version of this holographic drive.

The drive itself sells for $18,000 USD, and the media sells for $300 USD as of today. (September 30 2007)

I expected the drives to be perhaps $2000, and media to be very affordable, perhaps $40- so I was quite wrong there. I expected them to drop the price quickly as they solved manufacturing issues, and licensed the tech- wrong again. I also expected a much faster rollout of the higher capacity and speed versions- wrong again.

http://www.inphase-technologies.com/...ault.asp?tnn=4

I still have great hopes for the technology- but that seems to be wild, possibly naive, optimism. It appears to have been strangled at birth by its creators.