Sony Develops Powerful Laser for 1TB Optical Disc

[tsnorquist]

Good to see Jeremy Clarkson is in charge of laser development for Sony.

More Power!

 

[Guest]

i'm still a bit concerned about the ' perhaps for a more automated process' part. Does this mean we get a free Sony technician with each TB disc player? Where are we supposed to keep them? what do they eat?

 

[mattclary]

WTF?! I don't understand how they plan to use this. You don't need that much power for a reader or burner.

 

[JOSHSKORN]

So, um...damn. We're gunna end up with uhh...60 TB hard drives? I think the current highest is 3 TB, so 20 times that. Wow. Not saying we actually need that much storage but they'd better develop a technology that accesses (reads/writes) that drive in comparable speeds to today's 500 GB drives or even faster. I would like to one day be able to write 60 TB to a drive in the same amount of time as it takes us to write 500 GB to a drive now.

 

[tokenz]

[citation][nom]DaddyW123[/nom]Those commenting on how these will compare to current Hard Drives, or even how they will be incorporated into HDD's have it wrong. Optical media has always been a companion to HDD's. Remember the r/w speed of optical is still slower than that of a HDD. So Optical media is more for multimedia applications (like movies), or for long term data backups. I have 1TB in my livingroom HTPC and when I do backups I can only backup my pics and documents. imagine if I had enough space 1 optical disk to backup all of the seasons of various shows I have saved as well. Sure I could do this with an external HD, but I don't want to be buying and storing multiple External HDD's each time I fill up my DVR. getting a new CD would be perfect for that.[/citation]

Except it would be cheaper to just get external hdd's

 

[mavroxur]

Now you'll see optical drives coming with power supply recommendations

 

[tburns1]

Don't we all want to get away from external storage with moving parts? Another spinning disc solution just seems redundant and archaic. Surely some company (IBM?) is working on optical (holographic?) or flash-like storage? Anybody got any updated info about that?

 

[damiano13mg]

This is why Sony won the "format wars"

 

[wawa sxm]

i can only see optical media good for archiving....for movies i rather keep it all on my hdd (no scratchs and no getting up to change disc/movie)...now a days we got usb sticks and hdds....and if you doing a back up who wants to store everything on one disc!

for daddyw123...i doubt we ever be able to store entire seasons on 1 disc...blu ray would have been fine if not for hd and i suspect by the time these disc come out we'll have ultra hd and we'll be back to squarre one.
blu ray would be useful now if it was as cheap as dvd (still waiting)

 

[HavoCnMe]

I would like try that laser out in a mag-lite, if of course the mag-lite could muster up 100+ watts for operation.

 

[jeffk464]

Hmm, should allow for movies with resolution to match the newer TV's with resolutions higher then HD. Not super anxious for a whole new batch of video and audio standards. Anyone else feel these companies are constantly trying to get us to toss out our perfectly good audio/video equipment.

 

[jeffk464]

P.S. I'm still renting DVD's, oh well.

 

[mr_tuel]

[citation][nom]sot010174[/nom]I think he meant go digital DISTRIBUTION.[/citation]
Optical discs still qualify as 'digital distribution'. A lot of people are calling online distribution "digital" (which it is) and leaving out the traditional forms of digital distribution altogether. To them online=digital, but CD=/=digital. Instead, the real argument should be physically distributed vs. non-physically distributed media. CD vs. Download

 

[waffle911]

[citation][nom]back_by_demand[/nom]I can imagine putting a disc in the machine, pressing burn and it fires straight though the bottom of the PC, through the floorboards and blasts a hole 60 feet into the ground.[/citation]
Wouldn't it burn a hole through the top of the PC and through the ceiling up into the sky? The laser has to read the underside of the disc, so the lens would have to be pointing up, not down.
Also, Wicked Lasers has some pretty wicked handheld lasers, their best being a 0.5W green laser and a 1W blue laser (which, oddly, is less than 1/3 the price of the green one for twice the power). That may not sound very powerful, but when you consider that it's enough to burn stuff pretty quickly, and that what you can get at most stores is only 0.005W…

I would like try that laser out in a mag-lite, if of course the mag-lite could muster up 100+ watts for operation.

Wicked Lasers also has something like that, a 100W halogen-bulb flashlight that can burn paper in a matter of seconds or even cook scrambled eggs. Battery life? 5 minutes. But at 4100 lumens, it's still quite a feat.

BTW, I am not a spokesperson for Wicked Lasers or anything; reading the article and the comments that followed reminded me of them is all. Especially since their page explaining differences in beam geometries contains this little nugget of gold:

This is important because you want to point far, far away and because you want to burn stuff…lots of stuff.

 

[geofry]

Yeah, by the time the 450Gb SONY UV-Ray dics come out my memory stick will be as big and my pocket sized WD usb portable HD will be well over 10Tb.

Big time fail there SONY.

On a lighter note the military will be buying up PS4s at $400 each and break them up to build supercomputers and for their 100w UV-laser diodes and using the to make 10Kw pulse lasers arrays saving themselves the developement and procurement costs.

 

[lorky]

The reason they need such high power is it takes more power to burn more layers and that is how they can get that much data on a disc. The wavelength hasnt changed so the density per layer is relatively unaffected. The intensity also allows you to spin the disk faster while still having the power to spread your energy out over a larger area per time.

20x DVD-RW - 250mw diode
8x Blu-Ray - 250-300mw diode
12x Blu-Ray - 400-500mw diode
This laser - 100,000mw

So they can spin the disk much faster and create more layers.

 

[pochacco007]

sony further wasting investments on useless technology.

the successor to the blu-ray. so the ps4 will truly be the most expensive console on the market, going at a price of $1000!

 

[dEAne]

cool LASER is not just for optical drives, it has lots of applications.

 

[back_by_demand]

[citation][nom]dEAne[/nom]cool LASER is not just for optical drives, it has lots of applications.[/citation]
Like shooting down incoming missiles?

 

[mrmez]

I wonder if people are looking into disc durability?

 

[archange]

Sony does it again. Question is: are we ready for a new proprietary Sony design?!

 

[back_by_demand]

I just bought a 1TB HDD for £35
The same shop sells 25Gb Bluray for £2.35
How much do this disks cost? Everyone knows scaling on price isn't 4x, but even if it was that would still make it nearly 2.6 times more per Gb.
And there is always the chace you get a burn error.
Not cost effective.

 

[mouettus]

^^ I want moar flash capacity for one!!! I'm sick and tired of medias in form of a large plastic disc that can be scratched and written only once for the most part.

 

[LMF5000]

Just to answer two recurring comments: 1. This is a test laser, in a lab. Just because this laser consumes 100W does not mean that Sony are going to create an optical drive that needs 100W. Obviously they will develop a much smaller miniature version that can be used in commercial drives.

2. 100W is not a very powerful laser at all. The university where I study has a 10kW (that's ten thousand watts) laser which we use for cutting, welding and heat treatment of steel. The day it was being installed, the technician powered it up for a test fire lasting just a fraction of a second but one of the lenses was not focused properly and the beam hit a metal cupboard, making a hole two inches in diameter in the half inch thick steel door in less than a second. Now that's an example of a powerful laser (of course by no means the most powerful one in the world...)

 

[eddieroolz]

Lasers cannot possibly be bad for us