Posted on 04/19/2004 1:02:56 PM PDT by demlosers
TOKYO (AFP) - Electronics giant Sony and another Japanese company have developed a "paper disc" that can record more than two hours of high-definition images and be destroyed with scissors for foolproof data security, officials said.
The 25-gigabite Blu-ray optical disc is 51 percent paper and was developed jointly with Toppan Printing Co. Ltd. of Japan.
"Since a paper disc can be cut by scissors easily, it is simple to preserve data security when disposing of the disc," Toppan managing director Hideaki Kawai said in a joint statement with Sony.
Masanobu Yamamoto, senior managing director at optical disc development division of Sony, said the firms were able to use paper in the new disc as the Blu-ray technology does not require laser light to travel through the substrate.
The technical details of how it is possible to use paper as a data storage disc would be disclosed Tuesday at a conference in Monterey, California, according to Sony.
The combination of paper material and printing technology is also expected to lead to a reduction in cost per disc and will expand usage, the two partners said. It has yet to be decided when the disc will be commercially available.
The use of paper in electronics products is not new for Sony.
In 1950 when Japan was still struggling to rise from the ashes of World War II, Sony, then called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, made magnetic tapes using a similar grade of paper to that used for ordinary envelopes.
Sony used racoon hair brushes to daub magnetic powder over the paper to produce what it cally "SONI TAPE", starting its history as an audio-video products maker.
The Blu-ray disc format allows high-capacity optical-disc storage to be used for such technologies as high-definition televisions.
A group of manufacturers was set up in 2002 to promote a common standard for the disc format comprising Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electronics Industrial, Mitsubishi Electric Corp, Pioneer Corp, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sharp Corp, Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news) (news - web sites) and Thomson.
ROM, Scissors, Paper.
Of course, to write 25GB on a single sheet of paper you would have to be able write really, really small.
That was my thought. The paper is obviously coated with a film media that holds the data. I don't know what sort of media they use, but it can't be as durable as a plastic DVD disc (which is not that durable to begin with).
Apparently Ebay is full of rice grains.
Of course, to write 25GB on a single sheet of paper you would have to be able write really, really small.Which, in addition to taking a very, very long time, would lead to the world's worst case of writer's cramp :)
Cool technology!
I've had Beatles LPs, then pre-recorded audio cassette tapes, then CDs of the same thing. Now we're supposed to upgrade to DVD-audio, then Blu-Ray 3D spatial-surround, I suppose, while the conglomerates all jockey for participation in otherwise-totally-arcane-patent-derived license fees.
All this benefits the provider, and to a miniscule extent, the customer. And they expect the customer to keep coming back and laying ever more money down?
With the DMCA they've made it illegal to make archival backups of the encrypted media they want us to buy from them, so we'll be at the mercy of dust, heat, accelerated environmental aging, scratches, kids' hard play and the durability of the media, or be turned into criminals.
Why don't they come up with more and better titles to get my continued financial support, instead of "re-mastering" the old stuff?
We need another DC Tea Party.
HF
I would expect that snipping up a paper DVD sufficiently to render the data unrecoverable by a determined adversary would be harder than breaking a plastic one to achieve such a result. I would expect that even a shredded DVD would be recoverable by someone with the proper equipment and patience.
While I can certainly imagine paper DVD's being a modern counterpart to sound sheets (anyone remember those?), I would think that in situations where rapid data destruction was desired a better approach would be to simply make "conventional" DVD-R's out of celluloid.
Weren't we told to be careful not to litter because plastic in the environment would last forever, yet carefully stored quadraphonic 8-tracks return to dust in a few decades.
I loved to listen to John Lennon "#9 dream" on that old separate channel quad system.
The strings would rotate one way & the voice the other, so cool!
I've wondered if glass could be used for archival CDs. IBM uses glass for the platters of its high end disk drives. I suspect this is common.
Yes! And lately I found out that CD's don't last 100 years, either. Depending on who makes the CD, the substrate material can deteriorate due to inks and chemicals on the top surface leaching down into the substrate. When that happens, the data is lost and unreadable. And that can happen within a few years. Avoid adhesive labels on CD's or DVD's, they can cause the most damage.
About my 8-tracks, me and my buddies would ride around until 2 or 3 a.m. in our Chevys listening to the same cartridges over and over. As you said, the sounds were so cool.
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