new development on the evolution of Blu-Ray

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by joeorc

Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Sony Reports Progress in Holographic Storage

Sony managed to read and write on seven layers on holographic medium using the Micro-reflector method, further improving the company's previous achievements that stored data in 4 layers of a volumetric optical disc.

First this is not the next generation Blu-ray disk no matter how anyone tries to spin this. This is a completely different technology requiring the convergence of two different beams. It is no more the next generation Blu-ray disk than saying that DVD was the next generation VHS.

Also Sony is *way* behind InPhase and others. For example: InPhase is already shipping 300GB drives and disks -- admittedly in very, very small quantities, but they are shipping. Sony won't be shipping anything equivalent until 2009 at the earliest and probably not until 2010. By 2009 InPhase should be shipping their 800 GB disks and drives. They'd like people to believe they will be sampling these disks and drives by the end of calendar year 2008, but if they are actually sampling by mid 2009 and in true shipments by end of calendar year 2009 their customer base won't be too disappointed.

Sony is making great strides in catching up, but I don't expect them to catch up to the other holographic players before 2011 or 2012 at the earliest.

Originally Posted by joeorc

Sony said that it calculated the error rates of reproduced signals on a 7-layer medium, with the maximum reported error rate to be 4.1 ? 10-4.

This is a horrible bit error rate.
Other holographic players are claiming 10^-11 or higher which is what is really needed. If this report's number for the BER of Sony's system is accurate Sony is more than seven orders of magnitude short of what is needed to be accepted in the industry. (InPhase claims 10^-18, but no one really believes them as there is no way to truly verify such an extremely low bit error rate. To verify such a low error rate, you'd have to record a minimum of 5x10^17 bits with without a single error -- over 2 million of InPhase's 300 GB disks. Clearly no one has done this yet.)

Of course "pretty pictures to eye balls" -- as some of us in the extreme fidelity world call such imagery as typical films showing at HDTV kink of resolutions -- can stand worse BERs than data or critical imagery systems but anything less than 10^-6 is generally considered unacceptable even for this use. The information I had been given on Sony's system was almost to that level, but if it is really 4.1x10-4 then they have a long, long way to improve (a factor of 410 better as a minimum).

In general...

Will holographic media replace Blu-ray disks? Yes.

Will it happen in the next 5 years? No.

We'll see 100 GB Blu-ray disks for the CE market long before we see holographic media. We may even see 200 GB Blu-ray disks before that change happens.