Well, it appears like holographic storage will finally arrive and put those blue light based DVD replacements in their place. Let\'s just hope this doesn\'t go the way of beta-max.
I wonder why they had to go make it wider... Thicker I can understand, but wider... Perhaps they are trying to create a barrier to entry for when their patent expires. Because I think a lot of factories that needed a little retooling would now find much of their equipment obsolete. Also, would a 13cm disc change the form-factor needed?
Thicker, wider, it\'s all part of the service, baby.
But more seriously - the optics of holograms are several orders more complex than those required for standard DVDs. The equipment in general will be obsolete purely because of the different optics and treatments required.
You have to split the laser beam (as well as widen it), and run one beam through a filter mask, refocus it onto a photosensitive crystal and then be able to shine the reference beam on it to write. To read, you have to shine the reference beam on it in such a way that it shines back on to something that can read your mask.
And it all has to be within a margin of error such that you don\'t hit the crystal next to it / the wrong way. I imagine they have some sort of reflection mechanism on the disk that lets you shoot the reference beam through the back of the crystal to retransmit the data back onto the mask reader.
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