Sanyo Invents 12X High-Speed Blu-ray Laser 194
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."
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...
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.
Re:Is this still releven? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Re:Is this still releven? (Score:3, Insightful)
While YOU might not want hours of video of my daughter doing nothing in particular, I can assure you that my mother does :)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
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 line it's disc or hard drive, flash just isn't there yet.
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 have a decade or two of 'greater depression'."
Wait a minute: We already TOLD them that and they passed it ANYHOW.
Never mind.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Still not enough for LOTR on one disk (Score:1, Insightful)
Let alone the extended edition
Re:Attn: Barack Obama supporters: (Score:0, Insightful)
Does it bother you that corporate boards are pledging allegiance to John McCain? Does it bother you that they've promised to escalate the class war if he is elected? Does it bother you that his policies looks very similar to those of George W Bush, who crippled America's economy and induced famine by starting a war in the middle east and giving the profits to his corporate buddies?
Re:I don't get it (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.