Taking advantage of the Blu-ray disk's thick substrate structure, Sony Corp. and Toppan Printing Co. Ltd. have developed a "paper" disk that can hold 25 Gbytes of video data. The two companies will present the development at the Optical Data Storage 2004 conference next week in Monterey, Calif.
Blu-ray disks have a recording layer just 0.1 mm from the surface. Only the 0.1-mm thick protection layer, or cover layer, must be transparent for a laser beam to reach the recording layer.
Researchers at the two companies have been working for the last year on a paper material to support the 1.1-mm substrate. The newly developed material uses paper pulp with plastic soaked into it. Over 51 percent of its weight is a pulp material, a Sony spokesman said.
|