General Electric makes breakthrough in microholographic storage

Yes, Huzzah for Technology!

It's funny how big a deal everyone made of the whole HD-DVD and Blu-ray format war. I wonder what could possibly combat holographic memory.

Nah, I don't see a format war on the horizon. They won't be trying to use these for movies, because even though it's a step up in storage space, unless they're trying to introduce a super-hi def television by then, it'll be pointless for that. I guess if it's feasible, MS will put this in their next console...but do we really need 500 GB game discs? It's cool, but not really enough practical uses for a whole "war" to erupt.

@Troy

Toshiba is working on having a 4K set out sometime in 2010...

Still, I don't think anybody will be trying to make a move to super-hd any time soon. I'd question whether or not more than 25% of homes have HDTVs. 2011 is way too soon.

With internet getting faster and the internet thats going to change with CERNs GRID, and cloud computing, we are going to be downloading pretty much everything so i dont think this disc is going to be useful in time.

Actually guise, this is just in time for the Quad HD, which is planned for 2015, Quad HD being the double of Full HD, ie, 2160p

The only issue here now is no longer storage, it's read speed. If it's sufficient, fuck yeah GE.

All the 'higher than HD' formats fall into an even smaller niche than current HD; look how slowly HD is taking off, now imagine the same for a system which literally won't offer any improvement whatever unless your TV is about three times the size of most people's walls and you sit right next to it when watching.

(I'm exaggerating - but not much. For a normal-sized TV at normal viewing distance, HD already provides more detail than most people can see.)

So in other words there is no real need for a new optical disc format for consumer video, and if such a format were released anyhow (kind of like they released SACD / DVD Audio when CD was already good enough) I would expect it to have serious trouble selling.

However for data storage it's good to see improvements. Holographic storage has been, famously, utter vapourware for many years, with no chance of commercialisation, so I'm not sure I'm going to believe them straight off when they say this version *can* be commercially released. If it can, though, cool. No doubt there might be other contenders for the next disc format too - unless flash storage really has caught up to the point where you can get 500GB of flash for pennies, which doesn't seem all that likely even in 2011.

Also note: Blu-ray had prototypes in 2000 and consumer release in 2003. Six years later, most computers still don't have it and to most people, it still seems like a pretty neat 'new' format. In other words even if this new format is a success, you might expect not to be using it until 2016 or later - and since it's not made by a game console manufacturer, I wouldn't have much expectation of seeing it in a console before that kind of time either.

Doesn't the disc look the same?

lol...MS is going to like this too. Wouldn't they have to pay Sony somehow if they wanted to put a blu-ray player in their next console?

@Troy
yeah, for the disc and (i think?) every game sold on blu-ray xD
wouldn't be a smart option by MS

@Troy: Yes, MS would in theory have to pay license fees per Xbox 720 player, and per disc produced. Sony is part of the Blu-ray group and will receive part of these license fees.

In practice these license fees would not be paid directly - Microsoft would buy the Blu-ray drive from a manufacturer (I'm guessing not Sony; Lite-on or whoever) who will have paid the license fees to Sony and others. Similarly, the companies that actually produce discs pay the license fees.

Two things about this theoretical situation vs. the current one though:

1) Isn't Sony also part of the DVD group? If so it may already earn license fees on each 360 sold.

2) Microsoft's VC-1 format is part of the Blu-ray spec (even if nobody much uses it any more). I'm not sure this has per-player license fees, but if it does, Sony's paying them.

that looks like Hayley Williams...

For PC, the answer is probably yes.

Blu-ray players for the pc within the first year came down to sub $200.00 and by 1.5 years came to around $120.00 and now adays you can pickup a pc based blu-ray drive for $80 dollars on sale.

Compared to a fancy dvdrw at max speed with light scribe and some built in software and your only playing double the cost for a drive the reads discs 5-10x the size.

I'm just excited about this because potentially on pc releases of games a developer could do an edition using say the 'Rage' engine with ultra-hd textures and models. So the models look almost-real life and even if you have a crappy pc, the rage engine automatically scales down the ultra-hd textures down to whatever your pc can handle. When you get a new pc a few years down the line, the game just keeps looking bettttter and better! Until, eventually your 500GB disc is holding back your video card again(but, that would be a long while)

Or maybe it just looks worse and worse the better the graphics are due to the Uncanny Valley. And from what I think, it's going to take some SUPA DUPA graphics to start the climb out of it.

Uncanny Valley is only a problem when your depicting real things. In a FPS game like for example Bioshock, it's not real people you're looking at, so i dont think it's a problem. Same with something like Mario Galaxy.

Yes but their still humanoid and is meant to look real. I don't think it's meant for ONLY humans but humanoids or even creatures in general if enough work is put into them.

Uncanny valley? Really? Somebody learned a new term in psych class today. :D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_disc

"holographic drives are projected to initially cost around US$15,000, and a single disc around US$120–180, although prices are expected to fall steadily.[4] The market for this format is not initially the common consumer, but enterprises with very large storage needs."

I don't think it fall into any PCs that early, not even by 2012.

Did you just eat a grape?

I jizz right in my pants every time you're next to me
And when we're holding hands, it's like having sex to me
You say I'm premature, I just call it ecstacy
I wear a rubber at all times, it's a necessity

awesome. now i'm going to have that song stuck in my head for the remainder of the night. thanks guys!

Those guys totally stole that song without asking.

Because you totally have to ask me permission to steal something from me...

ugh

Think about how much a 500 gb hard drive costs. Now consider that they're making them in a format that is more compact with fewer moving parts. $50 sounds like a good deal to me. Although I guess that means games published on them are going to be a lot more...

I doubt they cost 50$ to make. Probably more like 20$. So you'll see games increase a lot, but it'll probably be worth it.
Tsk, imagine 90$ a game. Bleh

who says that 500 gigs is the only size they will come in, if they were to make games on it i bet they could use 50gig or less cds since no game would ever use all 500

yeah it definitely was

To a child born in the 80's, that version was a walk down memory lane. LOL.
I'm sure only 1/4th of the readers got it.

The question is: is it backwards compatible!?

Meh, probably the PS4. It will cost $1200.

Don't be so conservative.

Nah, the 720 will have the Holo discs, since near the end of this gen multiple DVD's will probably be the norm.

On the other hand the PS4 will probably make you a cookie eveytime you level up!
($600 cookie maker FTW!)

Bitrate goes up with per-layer (or for HDDs, per-platter) information density. So this will have good transfer rates. Access times will be no better (and likely worse) than Blu-ray, which itself is worse than DVD.

At $50/disc, this will have zero impact on games. Just look at the original NeXT machine to see what $50 discs does to software distribution, it made shipping software for the NeXT on disc completely non-viable. And for those who mention that perhaps there will be smaller capacity discs, those likely will not be much cheaper. The cost of the manufacturing isn't really per-bit, it's per disc.

The predictions of when this will be commercially viable are likely optimistic. They usually are.

And for those who mentioned above that holographic storage stories have been around since Blu-ray shipped... They've been around a lot longer than that. The first talk of holographic storage started when the original WORM/Magneto Optical drives came along, that was well over a decade ago.

This is very attractive to me, but then again I'm sprung on Blu-ray right now and I still don't have a drive for that either. $100 for a drive ($250 for a writer) is just too much.

I previously figured PS4 would be 8-layer Blu-ray, but now I wonder if this will put a crimp in that. I kind of suspect it won't, because 8-layer Blu-ray drives will be cheap, but honestly the technology will be outmoded within two years of shipping if this becomes real.