Two companies have announced their plans to make Blu-Ray digital video disks, which would be largely made from paper. Experts claimed these disks would be less harmful to the environment and less expensive to manufacture.
Features of the Blu-Ray disks:
A blue laser will be used to store information as opposed to a regular red one.
The smaller size of the wavelength would allow greater amounts of information to be accessed from this type of disk.
Data will be stored in the shape of small ridges on the surface of an opaque 1.1-millimetre-thick substrate, which lies under a transparent 0.1 mm protective layer.
Normally made from a polycarbonate plastic, the Blu-Ray disc will be made with a combination of paper and another polymer.
The cost for the paper for the prototype will be 51 cents, however would provide the capacity to store up to 25 gigabytes of data, compared to DVDs that provide half of this capacity.
Experts claimed that since oil is considered a resource difficult to come by, the decrease in the amount of raw material needed to produce a disk would be a valuable initial advantage. Easy disposal has been cited as another benefit of the Blu-Ray disk. Experts stated that because they are made of paper, simply using a pair of scissors would do the trick for disposal.
New Scientist April 16, 2004
USA Today April 18, 2004
A normal DVD holds five gigabytes of data, but this new paper DVD from Sony, a so-called Blu-Ray disc using a blue laser beam, holds 25 gigabytes.
One way to translate that 25 GByte size, by the way, is to note that it's two hours of High Definition TV.
The 25 gigs are greatly appreciated with the new larger hard drives. I recently purchased two external hard drives for backing up my personal data files and they were each 200 gigs. We are getting close to the petabyte drives (By the way, try typing in "petabyte drives" on Google and click "I'm Feeling Lucky").
Getting back to these new paper DVDs though, the breakthrough here isn't just in the paper.
Repeat, the breakthrough here isn't just in the paper.
In order to get 25 GBytes on to one layer of anything, the individual bits have to be much smaller than anything previously seen. Of course, the use of paper is cool, too. You can destroy them with scissors, for one thing. They're more flexible. They should be easier to make.
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