Paper disc gets thumbs down
p2pnet.net News:- The 25GB paper optical disc based on Blu-ray Disc technology and developed by Sony Corp and Toppan Printing Co doesn’t impress Michael Thomas, inventor of holographic optical data storage.
“I give it a strong thumbs down,” he told p2pnet. “This is just a marketing idea and nothing more.”
Toppan and Sony say they’ll announce details at the Optical Data Storage 2004 conference to be held from April 18 to 21 in Monterey, California.
“Using the disc-structure of Blu-ray Disc technology, the new paper disc has a total weight that is 51% paper,” says the JCNNetwork.
“The two companies jointly began this optical disc project approximately a year ago. Blu-ray Disc is commonly known for allowing more than 2 hours of high-definition program recording.”
But, says Thomas, “This is nothing new. The same idea was tried with floppies in the 80’s.
“The problem was, the paper couldn’t maintain the disk. It ran out tolerances and caused data errors and, much worse, destroyed a lot of floppy drives in computers.
“Personally, I don’t believe my data or information are so unimportant as to trust them to a paper substrate disk that has moisture absorbing qualities that could affect data reliability.
“They’ll be using violet light frequencies at 405 nanometers and I don’t believe the disk data will be able to survive repeated use. You’ll never see me stick a paper substrate disk in any drive I have.”
Sugar beet, or green environmentally friendly biogradeable plastic, has also been tried and failed for the same reason, Thomas adds: “humidity and temperature problems led to data reliability problems”.
April 16th, 2004 at 3:42 pm
The point of degradeable products is that they degrade. If you want something to last you have to build it that way. Sounds like common sense to me.
April 17th, 2004 at 12:38 am
biodegradeable means if you throw the product in a landfil or dump it will degrade without harming the environment.
as opposed to degrading in your computer disk drive.