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Sanyo Invents 12X High-Speed Blu-ray Laser
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Oct 06, 2008 10:50 AM
from the twelve-is-way-more-than-eleven dept.
from the twelve-is-way-more-than-eleven dept.
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."
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obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:5, Interesting)
and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?
archiving video (see above)?
archiving MP3, I guess not many people have >100GB of MP3s?
an easy method of archiving an entire HDD in a few disks?
when you look into it only video/HD makes such a disk make sense.
and on a *much* more serious note, stop waxing lyrical about the storage capacity and start talking about the durability, its life span, its resistance to UV, its archival qualities. I would be much more interested in a 4GB disk that actually had a change of lasting >10 years in a normal environment (for me..? room temp, light sealed bag).
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Resistance to UV is only useful if you leave your discs out on your desk in the daytime. Come that point, though, i'd be more worried about coffe-rings after you mistake your archive for a coaster.
I added cork to a bunch of failed burns to make drink coasters. For the bigger non regular size drinking glasses (ever see the 16 oz coke holiday glasses/hugs?)
on topic:
I would like to have 100GB+ disk backup. If it was RW even better. I use RW DVDs for a few home based backup. Format the DVD-RW disk and use it like a big floppy. Yes, there are flash drive and external hard drives that are bigger, but this was setup before flash drives were out. Older non geek people trust a CD/DVD more then the flash drive
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Asking what a user will use it for is shortsighted. DVDs have not been enough for me for several years (I backup using HDDs, cheaper considering my time). Even 100GB disc isn't all that exciting - perhaps HVDs will come out with 320-1TB data, but I suspect flash will be there sooner anyway.
Yes, there is porn for some but that's hardly the only use. For me, I tend to scan in a lot of books that were never printed in quantity. Depending on the book, if it's just for information or if there are important p
Re:obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:4, Interesting)
How, precisely, do you scan in books? Do you have to manually scan each page?
I'd really have no trouble spending a few hundred dollars on a scanner that would basically do it for me. I really want to move to an e-book, but most of the books I love are rather modest Fantasy books that aren't available in e-book form. A flat bed scanner would take me probably a year to get my entire collection scanned in, and that just won't do.
Parent
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I imagine that the process is the same for precious books now, just with digital cameras instead of microfilm.
Re:obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:5, Interesting)
and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?
It's telling that people are likely, these days, to ask how a normal PC user would use these disks to store his own data, rather than how media companies will use this to distribute their products more cheaply.
Anyway, yes, this would be handy for backups/archives. What else do people use physical media for? I have to back up 5TB of data every week, so don't tell me that these disks have gotten too big for practical application. Even at home, it'd be nice to be able to back up my entire computer onto one disk.
Go ahead and figure out how to store massive amounts of data on cheap plastic with no moving parts. I'll figure out a use for it.
Parent
Re:obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:5, Informative)
Well first, even if you buy a legal version of video, that doesn't necessarily mean you get media. iTunes movies and TV shows, for example, are sold without media. If you want to back that stuff up, you'll need something additional. Second, even if you have a legal DVD or Bluray version, you might want to backup that purchased copy. Third, I wasn't specifically talking about movies or TV shows. I'm not even necessarily talking about video.
And then beyond all that, backing up to an external USB drive doesn't necessarily serve my purposes unless I'm buying new USB drives on a regular basis. I'm not just talking about maintaining a running mirror of my current hard drive contents, but maintaining a backup. By that, I mean that sometimes you want to keep copies at set increments, like having a monthly backup that you keep and don't overwrite. Not only does this protect you from a catastrophic failure of your hard drive, but also protects you from data being deleted or overwritten.
Ideally, those backups should be on some kind of WORM media (so I don't accidentally erase something while I'm restoring) that's cheap, reliable, and lightweight. Even for my personal stuff, I can burn a bunch of DVDs and mail them to someone. Since they're light and small, shipping won't be expensive. Since there are no moving parts, I don't have to worry very much about them breaking in transit, but since they're cheap it's not a big problem even if they do break.
Parent
Re:obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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fail! you are not many people.
How many people does it take to have many people? Is it more than a couple several or more than a few several?
Is this still releven? (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
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Distribution :)
I'm not going to send my mother a hard drive if I want to send her pictures or video. Right now I use DVDs.
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The Slide Show of the 21st Century.
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While YOU might not want hours of video of my daughter doing nothing in particular, I can assure you that my mother does :)
Re:Is this still releven? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Is this still releven? (Score:4, Funny)
Old enough to look good in a bikini.
Young enough to land-you in jail, you DOMAI! ;-)
Parent
CD sometimes not so good... (Score:3, Interesting)
honestly, CD are too easy. simply google for "lost cds uk" and see what a total balls up various government agencies have made of giving all our data away freely,
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=uk+lost+cds&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a [google.co.uk]
hell teeth, it should of been easy enough to encrypt it on the CD as a minimum, or VPN it without using a disk.
yes, they are easy to use - but too eas
450mw beam (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [bbc.co.uk] here in the UK, I'm wondering if similar restrictions might appear for drives like this.
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Isn't that getting into dangerous territory
Yup! Don't remove it. DVD burners already contain dangerous lasers, and those are in the 200mW range IIRC.
Re:450mw beam (Score:5, Informative)
When encapsulated within a system so that it is not possible for the beam to escape under normal usage then the whole system can be given a class 1 rating and a class 1 label. The laser itself is a class 3B and would have to have this rating if removed from the player. Current Blu-ray recorders are 250mW but are considered safe as they are encapsulated.
Parent
Ouch! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. And in other news, those metal things inside toasters get dangerously hot.
Personally, I've given up on using half-disassembled devices.
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Your nerd credentials are hereby revoked. Slashdot bylaws section 12, paragraph 23: to post here you must have at least one half disassembled and operable PC within 100ft of you at all times.
Instant +1 karma if run the system without any mechanical structure at all, beyond FR4 and off the shelf PSUs/HDs.
Re:450mw beam (Score:4, Interesting)
They are not retailing a bare laser, they are (well, someday) selling a drive. How is that any different than selling a microwave? Do you know what parts they use in those?
arrrg, should have been a car analogy. -slaps head-
Parent
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The laser pointers which fall into class IIIb (5-500mw) are all exposed and can be viewed directly.
Re:450mw beam (Score:5, Funny)
It's a big risk if if you're putting your head into the player and resting your eyeball directly over the laser diode. For people who do that, all we can hope for is more powerful lasers, or perhaps blu-ray players with sharks inside to which the laser is attached.
Parent
No Thanks (Score:2, Funny)
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Invent? (Score:2)
They didn't really "invent" this, did they? They just kinda built it from pre-existing ideas-- but bluer.
And to answer what it'll be used for: Releasing a new generation of Blu-Ray players that aren't backwards compatible, forcing everyone who has bought a Blu-Ray to rebuy all their Sony-branded movies. Obviously.
No drives exist - just the laser (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Worthless. (Score:2, Insightful)
No matter what the technical achivements, in the end you're still hooking it up to one of Sony's defective players. Pass.
External hard drive (Score:3, Interesting)
WD My Book Essential Edition External 1TB Hard Drive - $166.99 (link [pricegrabber.com]), enough to store 80 hours of High-Definition video (Lord of the Rings "extended edition" should fit in one).
That's $16.70 each 100 GB - I bet that both: the player is more expensive that this external HD and each disk is more expensive that $16.70.
The only reason one cannot easily use an external HDs to store and play video content is because the mainstream Movie Industry won't sell their movies in a non-DRM-encumbered format (say, XVid in an AVI wrapper) - after all, how would they force people to buy the same movies again and again with each new format if they went with an open data format ...
That said, get a "Digital Media Player" with XVid/DivX support and HD capability and attach one of these external HDs. Then Rip and re-encode your movies (or don't re-encode - there's enough space for high-bitrate files in there) or get the HD version of the movie/tv-series from the Internet in a non-DRM-encumbered format (funny how the pirates provide a better product) and voila - days worth of movies and TV series at the touch of a button (with no pay-per-view charges).
PS: Yes, I am sour that the dream of having your personal movie library accessible from you remote without moving anything but a finger is being hindered by the big studios ...
Sure.. (Score:5, Funny)
It can move a lot of data but is it shark-mountable?
How fast can you spin them? (Score:3, Funny)
Ok, this is great, but how fast can you spin them before they explode?
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It's still the cheapest way to distribute data. CDs/DVDs are produced for a few pennies - and even Blu-Ray is produced at a cost significantly lower than flash or magnetic media of the same capacity.
For backup, it probably will still make sense to use some kind of magnetic media.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Parent
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [amazon.com]. 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.
Parent
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
One caveat, flash memory is not as reliable of a storage medium as some believe, particularly as densities increase, particularly as they use smaller and smaller processes. Depending on the specific technology, and the level of error correction built into it, optical (even with dust and scratches) is more robust. Flash is great for sneaker net, or the family vacation pictures, but I'm not sure it's suitable for anything you care about.
As long as the market driving this media is digital photography, the concern about the occasional bit being flipped isn't going to change anything. Flipping a bit on almost anything else, is catastrophic.
Parent
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
Guess you've never heard of OUM memory technology. Same glass substrate that's used on re-writable optical media, but instead of using a laser to flip bits you use an electrical pulse to change the state of the glass from amorphous (bit 0) to semi-crystalline (bit 1) and voila no more worry about bit flip. It also is stronger than silicon wafers and can tolerate more heat and requires less power for changing bits. Also, due to using the crystalline structure representing 1 or a 0, it's non-volatile. Access times are faster than standard flash devices today. The read/write cycles are several orders of magnitude higher as well than current flash memory.
Parent
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
So, can I buy it? Where? What does it cost?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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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 l
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/me takes an aspirin
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Remember that the reason Nintendo abandoned cartridges was because a 8.5 gigabyte DVD was cheaper than the equivalent ROM.
Two things:
First, those were probably EPROM's, not flash, but don't quote me on it.
Second, supply+demand+moore's law = totally different situation today.
...I wouldn't be suprirsed if a 1GB EPROM costs more than used car....
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Informative)
Optical media, even in its most primitive form, has always been far more robust than magnetic media were it to be distributed in the same, unshielded manner.
Optical media used to come in "caddies", not unlike the caddies that 3.5" and Zip floppy disks still use. An early sign of optical media's robustness was the fact that mass-market CDDA drives operated caddyless; while early CD-ROM and CD-WORM drives came with a single caddy, into which you'd interchange the disc itself prior to loading into the drive.
Improvements in error correction, the manufacturing process of both the media and the drives, and the improved errorless reading of optical media have led to optical media far outstripping other disc media for robustness.
So: "sucks"? You only see it that way because it gets into situations where other media cannot. Knocking around for a couple of weeks in the footwell of your car, for instance. As an interesting exercise for the reader, try this with a platter of a hard disk containing verifiable information. (Hint: it's only cheating if you work at a forensic data recovery lab.)
Now consider other media: Iomega Jaz and Syquest removable magnetic media were distributed with caddies; yet the market never got off the ground. But consider that these hard disks are finely machined pieces of equipment: an optical disc is simply a pressed piece of crud. Maybe magnetic media could learn something from it, by pressing a cheap plastic disk painted with a layer of magnetic film. Basically a floppy on a hard substrate...
This format would have to lose its caddy, too, if it were to compete on cost terms with the optical disc. Maybe it could do it gradually, the same way the optical disc did. A crutch until the loading, head alignment, and error correction technologies improve sufficiently to do without caddies.
Flash memory? Please, just visit the Apple store and compare the prices of iPods with flash and HD storage.
And just in case you're wondering: I switch between disc and disk because I'm English, and because disk in British English is an abbreviation of diskette, which is imported from U.S. English. There is no spelling of diskette with a c.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But... but CDs are made out of a polycarbonate. The samt hing that Bullet-Proof Vests are made of! They're therefore unscratchable! (See, I remember the late 80's well)
Sapphire! We need to make CDs out of Aluminium Oxide. First we need to mass-produce the stuff in enough volume that the perceived volume goes down. And then use it on PDA, phone, ogg player screens while we're at it.
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Pulses can be shorter, and therefore more frequent, for the same amount of reflected light.
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For comparison, 1x DVD is 10Mbit/s.
Future, hell. Send 'em to the past. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ha