Pioneer Electron Beam DVD

wordboy writes "Pioneer Electronics just announced that they will introduce an electron-beam recorder for next-generation optical data storage. The electron beam is much finer than that of a typical laser so they are able to achieve densities of 50GB or more with a standard 12cm disc. But can it cook my TV dinner, too?"

SEM?

[BWJones]

I wonder if this technology could be used to create inexpensive scanning electron beam microscopes? (As seen in Blade Runner).

Can it cook my dinner?

[BJZQ8]

That's an electron beam, not a microwave beam. It won't cook your dinner. It might show you bacteria growing on your food, though.

Decay?

[ObviousGuy]

We know that CD-Rs and DVD-Rs decay over time as the chemicals holding the data inside the discs slowly deteriorate.

What kind of lifespans are we looking at for this kind of media?

Gackpth

[Azureflare]

Good lord, 50gb?

How long would that take to burn? Lesse... If we have standard 4x, that would mean 50gb in 20 minutes... which would mean, hmm..
50*1024=51200Mb
51200/(20*60)= ~43megs/second.

Wow. My hard drive can't even transfer over 10 megs per second to a second hard drive in my computer. I can see why this technology is still quite a far way off.... I would have to seriously upgrade my whole system if this came along even in a couple of years!

Re:If I Want a DVD Recorder...

[Hooya]

.. and the HP (?) DVD recorder where it etches an image on the top side with the same laser that burns the data on the bottom eliminating the need for a stick-on-label. i don't recall if the DVD format itself is new/different or not. the media itself is different tho (has to have that etchablity on the top side).

Promising but..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty bored of being baited by these enticing sounding technologies, only to never hear a single thing about them ever again.

Believe it or not, some years back a car could run on electricity! electricity!

Predicted in 1945...

[ron_ivi]

This storage device was also predicted by Vannevar Bush [theatlantic.com] before the transistor was invened back in 1945.

"
Existing totals could then be read by photocell, and the new total entered by an electron beam.
"

Pretty cool foresight.

RTFA

[fm6]

All of which assumes that they're looking to make a portable electron-beam disc player. That's not at all what they're talking about. They specifically say that this is a tech for mastering discs. For playback, you'd use Blu-Ray [blu-ray.com] or something similar. That would be more advanced than anything on the market now, but it's still just a plain old-fashioned laser.

Woops

[ZeroExistenZ]

Woops seems I was just to late for my story, or lacked the juicy article :)

Source: Blu-ray Disc [blu-ray.com]

Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD) is the name of a next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by eleven leading consumer electronics companies (Hitachi, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK and Thomson). The format was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition television (HDTV), which isn't possible with todays VCRs. Blu-ray makes it possible to record over 2 hours of HDTV, or more than 13 hours of SDTV on a 27GB disc. There are also plans for higher capacity discs that are expected to hold up to 54GB of data.

The beauty is, as opposed to the "not until 10yrs"-statements, you can buy a recorder [blu-ray.com] from sony (BDZ-S77) already in Japan.


When will I be able to buy a Blu-ray Disc recorder? [blu-ray.com]

You'll probably have to wait until 2005-2006 for Blu-ray recorders to become commonly available. The driving force behind the development of Blu-ray Disc recorders is the need to record HDTV programming and currently the only country where HDTV is well established is Japan. The only Blu-ray Disc recorder that's currently available to consumers is the Sony BDZ-S77 Blu-ray Disc Recorder, but as you can see in our Blu-ray Recorders section, most well-known consumer electronics companies have their own prototype Blu-ray Disc recorder in development, so we expect to see more Blu-ray recorders on the Japanese market during 2004.

According to Sony of America's senior vice president Mike Fidler, products based on the Blu-ray Disc format are not likely to be available in the United States until 2005. However, LG Electronics has stated that they have plans to introduce a Blu-ray Disc recorder in the United States in the third quarter of 2004.

While current optical disc technologies such as DVD, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM use a red laser to read and write data, the new format uses a blue laser instead, hence the name Blu-ray. The benefit of using a blue laser is that it has a shorter wavelength (405 nanometer) than a red laser (650 nanometer), which means that it's possible to focus the laser beam with even greater precision. This allows data to be packed more tightly on the disc and makes it possible to fit more data on the same size disc. Despite the different type of lasers used, Blu-ray Disc recorders can be made backwards compatible with current red-laser technologies and allow playback of CDs and DVDs.

JVC [blu-ray.com], Maxell [blu-ray.com], Maxell TDK [blu-ray.com], mitsubishi [blu-ray.com], sony [blu-ray.com] and many others are working on this...
HP and DELL were accepted into the group to help further develop the format for PC data storage in 2004. (which means, this is going to be widespread in a few years.)

Holography may have some better solutions

[Ex-MislTech]

Excerpt: http://www.aprilisinc.com/holographic_storage.htm

#1:This makes possible capacities of more than 1,000 GB
on a CD disk format.

#2:Consequently, holography provides a substantially faster
data transfer rate from a single head, surpassing 100 MB/sec.
By comparison, DVD technology provides a data transfer rate
of only 5 MB/sec.

Thanks,
Ex-MislTech