Wannabe

Holographic Challenge for DVDs

While Blu-ray and HD-DVD fight over next-generation DVDs, holographic storage is catching up.
November 28, 2005

If you thought Blu-ray and HD-DVD were the only new disc formats coming out this decade, think again. The emergence of holographic data storage technology may hamper growth for the two rival high-definition formats in the years to come.

Holographic data storage has existed for 40 years, but is just coming to the commercial market and may reach the consumer market by 2007. The new DVD formats promoted by Sony (Blu-ray) and Toshiba (HD-DVD) are expected to go on sale in early 2006.

As opposed to the blue laser technology used both in Blu-ray and HD-DVD, holographic storage goes beyond recording the surface of the disc and records through the full depth of the medium.

Longmont, Colorado-based InPhase Technologies has formed an alliance with Hitachi Maxell to sell discs the size of a DVD that can store 300 GB of data. By comparison, Blu-ray discs will be able to hold 50 GB and HD-DVD discs will store about 30 GB. InPhase’s Tapestry holographic system can store more than 26 hours of broadcast-quality high-definition video.

While other technologies record one data bit at a time, holography allows a million bits of data to be written and read in parallel with a single flash of light. So transfer rates are significantly higher than current optical storage devices.

As a result, the holographic discs also can read and write data at 10 times the speed of the DVDs currently in the market, or six times that of blue laser discs.

Commercial holographic discs will go on sale by the end of 2006. The initial product, called Tapestry Media, will come in the form of 130mm discs made from a photopolymer material.

InPhase is currently marketing the product to enterprises that can afford the high cost of the discs and readers. Currently, the reader costs a lofty $15,000 each, while one single disc costs $120—clearly unaffordable for the consumer market, Liz Murphy, vice president of marketing at InPhase, said Monday.

The hopes to fill the archival needs in the commercial markets for specific applications such as security, geospatial imagery, entertainment and broadcast, medical, and scientific applications, Ms. Murphy said.

Consumer Product

However, as the cost of the equipments falls, she thinks InPhase’s technology could compete in the consumer market.

“At some point, holographic storage has the potential for being a consumer product,” Ms. Murphy said. The company is in the process of research and development for consumer applications and is looking for partners in the form of consumer electronic companies that can take the product to that market by 2007.

The technology is also offered by Optware, a five-year-old holographic data storage company based in Kanagawa, Japan.

Someday, it might be possible to put all your music on a postage-stamp-sized chip if consumer-based applications evolve.

In May, InPhase closed a large funding round to help the company commercialize its product (see InPhase Scoops Up $32.1 M). InPhase’s first commercial victory came two weeks ago when Turner Network Television became the first television network to air content originating on holographic storage.

In October, engineers from InPhase and Turner put a promotional advertisement into InPhase’s Tapestry holographic disc as a data file. The ad was recorded by the holographic prototype drive into the disc and then electronically migrated to a server and played back to air at the scheduled time.

“This was done to investigate the feasibility of using holographic storage for broadcasting television content,” said Ron Tarasoff, vice president of broadcast technology and engineering at Turner Entertainment Networks. “This is an ideal way to store high-quality, high-definition movies.”

Although holographic storage technology has great advantages, there will be limited overlap between this technology and blue laser technologies, said Wolfgang Schlichting, an analyst with IDC. Some of its drawbacks are high cost of components and difficulty in mass manufacturing which will take time to evolve.

“Ten years from now, [holographic storage] could work as a replacement technology [for blue laser],” Mr. Schlichting said.

© 1993-2005 Red Herring, Inc. All rights reserved.

Altimus Prime

I guess this means I'll have to buy the White Album again.

I wonder what the first release on this format will be. Home Alone, anyone?

boe

I look at these things as a good thing. The tougher the upcoming competition the more features they will have to release sooner if they want to establish a foothold to prevent people from jumping ship. I'd love for them to HAVE to release 1080p, DTS-HD on the first generation players instead of gimping them so they can sell you the gen 2 ones when some competition actually occurs or sales are slow. Let's see what excuse can we use - oh the technology wasn't in production so we couldn't test DTS-HD or Dolby Digital Pus (because we don't have hard drives that can do the exact same thing and yet we managed to slap a movie on the disc even though there were no units in production), there weren't any 1080p units we could test on(execpt for 4 projectors and 6 TVs and 10 monitors that already exist).

Fool me once shame on you - fool me twice shame on me.

Iron_Giant

10 years from now...I am happy with DVD, HD is just a plus. But, to put an entire season of Smallville on one chip/Disk with no compression is cool. But, if the one Chip/Disk becomes unplayable, then all is lost. In computers I do not like all in one solutions, so I may not like it in my HD DVD/Chip/Halo medium.

woofman

Interesting article, as if we needed something else to speculate and debate about.

Bareit

This has been "on the horizon" for some time now. I remember getting excited about it when I heard about it shortly after DVDs came out. I won't get my hopes up until I see players and discs at my local retailer.

Qui Gon Jim

While this is far from "WalMart" ready, I think that discussion of this stuff is important so that you don't end up backing a loser new format. If there is a format war for HD, and these guys can move this format forward quickly, they may be able to swoop in and steal their thunder. With that kind of capacity, they could easily design the media to be forward compatible to the higher resolutions past the 1080P sets now hitting the market. Buy the film now and watch it at 1080P and when that 1240P (or whatever) set comes along, you disc is ready to go for that. After typing that, I don't think Hollywood would settle for that LOL.

mattgoble

I'm still not quite sure how this works for audio / video.

The demonstration I saw was concerened with laying down pages of data at a single point on the disc. When this point is 'full', the laser(s) focus at a different point on the disc and lay down more data. As far as I'm aware, the discs don't actually spin because you're not pulling off a stream of data, the disk merely 'shifts' to a different position.

Hence all the examples given are for archival data.

And yes, I do believe there are several competing holographic formats

Cocopugg

The thought of one day being able to backup my entired 5,000 title DVD collection onto a couple of discs does intrigue me...It's about time we traded our multiple DVD 400 disc changers for just a couple of discs...Anything that saves room is alright in my book!

Tarantino

That'd be nuts, to have a complete season on one disc.

= J

Wannabe

You could fit only 35 regular DVDs on a holographic disc.

TomOpus

Nice movie reference

Doughboy

HD-DVD will be replaced by HG-DVD?

Bronkster

only 35. the horror.

rdodolak

Apparently the format has a potential 1.6 TB capability. More info from the Digitalbits, but it sounds like the studios may squash this in terms of a viable option for home entertainment.

eau

That's like 40+ terabytes of diskspace!

DthRdrX

Agreed. It's pretty worthless as a source of pre-recorded content. They (studios) are pretty happy with 25-30 GB discs for HD. These Holo discs cost too much for what the industry considers capacity overkill for prerecorded HD. The only thing I see happening with this technology is that maybe a company like JVC will start another niche format with one or two studios releasing limited titles. 4K resolution perhaps someday?

It would be awesome for recording but I have a feeling we are a long way away from seeing something like this on a single disc. It's a funny topic though b/c I remember saving all of my files in middle school on 5.25 floppy, then moving to 3.5 floppy in High School, CD-Rs when I started college, and now we are using Dvds. Looks like the PC industry is going Blu-Ray next. Something better will eventually follow it.

Tom Banjo

I'd love that. It definately seems to be the best use of a disc of that capacity. It'd be a waste to put a two hour movie and a couple of extras on something that size.

Qui Gon Jim

They could have a high resolution copy of a movie on a disc, without as much compression so the film could look really good. That is why large capacity isn't a "waste."

Cocopugg

They're already working on 25 terabyte discs. Those would hold about 5,000 single layered or 2,500 double layered movies each. Skies the limit on this format as far as disc space is concerned.

Numanoid

Screw DVDs, I need this for my PC NOW!!!

Calculon

Screw your PC, I need this for my pr0n NOW!!!

Kumar J

I have seen the recorder before.It's quite huge.Like a projector and the company Optware is headed by a guy who quit Sony to start this company.They were trying to make the recorder a bit smaller and they said by year 2007 they plan to market it.With 25TB the PC industry could be having a big leap into the future.My 20GB laptops feels useless in the TB region.I was just lokking at the Toshiba 1TB DVD recorder.But this things blow is away

DthRdrX

Interesting. I didn't know that. I have read that Sony has already purchased a developmental hardware kit of some kind for this holo technology from this company.

This technology is still overkill for 1080p HD though. 4K perhaps, but not HD.

"InPhase is currently marketing the product to enterprises that can afford the high cost of the discs and readers. Currently, the reader costs a lofty $15,000 each, while one single disc costs $120—clearly unaffordable for the consumer market, Liz Murphy, vice president of marketing at InPhase, said Monday."

Tarantino

I wonder how much a season on one disc would cost.

= J