InPhase to demonstrate holographic storage at CES

December 20, 2005

We get mail now and again for events to the CES and we received a good one this morning. It might be of interest to read this announcement in case you are available to witness the interesting demo! We can also read that Turner Entertainment has now used this medium, at least to some extent. As it says here in this release, they have actually aired programming from one of the new fangled discs!

InPhase Technologies (www.inphase-tech.com), the leader in holographic
data storage, will present and demonstrate its prototype holographic
Tapestry system at CES 2006.

Customer shipments of the
300 GB InPhase Tapestry product will commence in 2006, representing the
initial offering in the family of InPhase holographic drives and media,
which have capacities ranging up to 1.6 terabytes (TB) and data rates of
960 Mb/s. The Tapestry holographic system can store more than 26
hours of broadcast-quality high-definition video on a single 300 gigabyte
(GB) disk, recorded at a 160 megabit per second (Mb/s) data
rate.

InPhase and its joint
venture partner, Maxell Corporation, will be the first to deliver
holographic media to market next year. InPhase and Maxell Corp.
executives can be met in Maxell's Meeting Room N120 in the North Hall of
the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Last month, InPhase
announced that Turner Network Television became the first television
network to air content originating on holographic
storage.

InPhase has publicly
demonstrated the first prototype holographic storage system in 2005 at
broadcast shows in the U.S., Europe, and Japan this
year.

Lets hope that this new format will treat their potential retail customers with due respect, not like some sort of thieving low life's and give us a DRM we can live with. In addition, please do not use this technology to bleed us to death when we wish to access features such as time shifting, backup or streaming technologies.

InPhase and Maxell have a golden opportunity with this single format to cause Sony to wish they never heard the term optical storage. Due to the constant bickering and lack of co-operation between the competing Blu-ray, HD-DVD camps and the catering to content providers with restrictive DRM, we are still faced with two choices if we take a cotton to bluray storage schemes. And with it, the old adage "the lesser of two evils" comes to mind, at least for me.

But, now it's feasible that HD-DVD/Blu-ray and their 15 to 25 gigabyte discs, could simply just be passed over for a superior technology! Coupled with the recent negative publicity against Sony concerning their horrific disregard of consumer rights and privacy with the rootkit DRM fiasco - it's going to be a tough sell at my house! Bring on the 300 gigabyte discs now, I'm ready to check out this Tapestry...

Source: InPhase