You reach for your collection of the 100 most popular movies of all time, and pull down from your shelf — one disc. That’s a possible scenario resulting from an announcement Monday that General Electric has made a breakthrough in storage on optical discs using holographic technology.
Microholographic Storage
At the moment, the breakthrough exists only in the company’s research labs, but it holds the promise of enabling huge amounts of storage on a single DVD, possibly creating new consumer and business markets.
According to a report in Monday’s New York Times, the GE team has pioneered an approach different from that of other researchers who, for decades, have been looking for ways to exploit holography’s potential for extremely dense storage. Working on this for the past six years, the GE researchers have created microholographic storage by utilizing small holograms with increased reflectivity.
Rather than burning marks in the recording layer of the disc, as current CD/DVD/Blu-ray technology does, the GE researchers create chemical changes in microscopic patterns. The team’s most recent breakthrough was when it was able to make major improvements in the materials used. This resulted in substantial increases in the amount of light that can be reflected from the holograms, enabling the relatively low laser power levels of a consumer player to read the disc.
The team formatted the holographic materials so a player could conceivably be developed to read CDs, standard DVDs, Blu-ray Discs, and the new holographic discs.
But the storage difference would be immense. A regular DVD can store up to five gigabytes, a Blu-ray Disc up to 50 GB, and the GE holographic discs as much as 500 gigabytes.
Consumer Market?
Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for consumer technology at the NPD Group, noted that other companies have looked at holographic storage, but to date “it hasn’t been…