View Full Version : HD DVD, Blu-Ray and Hollographic Storage



okcpulse
11-20-2005, 12:24 PM
HD DVD and Blu-ray will be doing battle soon for the mass media market as major media manufacturers put their money where the profit might yield the most. And it seems so far HD DVD might be the disc to make the cut.

The BIG question is this... how well will anyone adapt to the new technology. DVD players just got dirt cheap, DVD sales made VHS tapes a thing of the past, and CDs became the norm. The only place you can really find casette tapes anymore is on a truck stop rack, or source tapes in a recording studio.

HD DVD and Blu-ray both can store roughly 21 GB of data, or several feature-length motion pictures with the bonus features. But developing a standard will be a major hurdle to overcome. Not only will consumers not adjust right away, but manufacturers who stamp DVD movies for retail sale will have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in new stamping machines, something most manufacturers don't find economically feasible at this time.

Now comes hollographic storage. This see-thru disc is the same size as a standard DVD and CD, and uses three lasers to triangulate a point to finely microscopic layers of data. This method allows a single disc to hold 1.2 terabytes of data. Not only will stamping these discs be exuberantly expensive, but an average techie can only guess that these discs will only be used by technology companies and major corporations for mass storage.

At this point, these discs are cost-prohibitive. For example, last year, the double-layer DVD (8.5 GB Capacity) was $29.88 for a three pack of blank DVDs. This year, the price fell to about $12 for a three pack. On the contrary, a five pack of 4.7GB single-layer DVDs is roughly $4. Stacks of fifty are $20.

HD-DVD, Blu-ray and Hollographic Storage? Not this Christmas!