You can bet it will still come region coded
That is all
Aussie scientists have devised a digital disc design capable of holding the content from 2000 DVDs - more than nine terabytes of data - in a unit physically no bigger than a DVD or Blu-ray Disc. In a paper entitled Five-dimensional optical recording mediated by surface plasmons in gold nanorods and published today in the …
Just what I was thinking. Can this really be a commercial reality if it has to be made of gold? The article suggests that the technique harnesses special properties of gold. I would have thought that making it happen in a cheaper medium would be at least as high a priority as improving the read/write speed.
Or perhaps it doesn't use all that much gold? More info please ...
2000 DVDs worth of data, that works out to about 13750 CDs of information, or the equivalent of 5.83 million floppy disks.
That could also translate to 3,645,812,500 pages of A4 text, or 364,581,250 high-quality images (although, with today's HD and pr0n, those numbers most certainly should be re-evaluated).
How many GB would you loose to a single scratch? They should take advantage of the density by making smaller discs (say, 5x5cm) and packaging them in sturdy cases to prevent stratching...
I doubt this will be any use to the movie industry, they simply don't need that much data, 5400p resolution is pointless, and will definitely not want to sell discs with 100s of movies since they would not make much money that way.
Take a look at the back of your computer. Have you noticed that the contacts on almost all the sockets are gold plated. Same with the connectors on the cables. Take a look inside, and you will find gold plated expansion cards, gold plated socket for those cards, and gold plated pins on the CPU and its socket. Next, go to the factory where the computer was built. If any of the chips are Ball Grid Array then the circuit board is probably gold plated. The older style chips with pins around the edges use gold to connect the pins to the chip.
A 500nm layer of gold covering the area of a DVD is US$1.40 at today's (high) prices. I doubt that they would need so much gold, or that the mass market would want 9TB in a 12cm disc when they could have 1TB in a 4cm disc, or whatever flash and hard disks look like 10 years from now.
given the size of the chip on my microSD card and the fact that it holds 16GB of data (larger ones I believe are available). how much data would I be able to store on a card the size of a CD?
Lots I'd bet!
In case the scientists are reading, DVD will be my final optical format. There is no need to keep developing them.
Just record in HD a whole year of the view from the top of a mountain / forest clearing / garden / whatever you like , and use a 100in HD screen as a window in your beedroom / living room / kitchen.
Choose full immersions with the ceiling, walls and floor projected.
Awake every morning to a different dawn in your favorite place, go to bed with a beautiful sunset, as if your house was planted there.
When this sales as cookies, remember where you read it before ...
Albert.
to answer my own question, it would seem quite a lot!
a CD is 120mm in diameter, without the need to spin we can use the whole surface area so
60^2*Pi = 11310mm^2
I estimate the chip in my microSD to be around 8mmx8mm = 64mm^2
11310/64 = 177 chips on the CD
177 x 16GB = 2832GB
Obviously I've done a bit of rounding, and assumed that microSD can be somehow hooked up to create larger storage. CDs are thicker than microSD too so I'd say we're better off just making a 9TB SD card than mucking around with gold and lasers.
Now I've done that calculation, it's making the 128GB SSD hard drives look a little small for current technology, or is that just me? Ooh, a black helicopter, you don't see those eve..
"I doubt this will be any use to the movie industry, they simply don't need that much data, 5400p resolution is pointless"
Seems you haven't heard of Red's upcoming cameras Epic and Scarlet, these discs would be perfect for archiving all that data, of course it's not for consumers in the end we'll just have to wait for 4k displays to become affordable in 20 years :-)