TWO years from now the world鈥檚 smallest optical disc will let your cellphone store five two-hour movies, squirrel away 25,000 digital photos or hoard 48 hours of MP3 music.
快猫短视频 learned last week that the electronics company Philips has been secretly researching the technology in Britain at its research centre in Southampton. It uses a miniature optical disc that records, plays back and erases data using the same precision blue lasers that are being developed for the next generation of high-definition video recorders.
The Philips disc has no catchy name yet, so the system is known as SFFO, short for Small Form Factor Optical. In Japan last week, Philips demonstrated SFFO discs to convince sceptics that it really is possible to store 4 gigabytes on a 3-centimetre disc, and to make a drive as small as a memory card that can read it reliably.
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SFFO spun off from Philips鈥檚 work on Blu-ray, the emerging standard for a system that will use blue lasers to record high-definition TV pictures on DVD-sized discs. Blu-ray is backed by a group of leading firms, including Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp and Sony.
The 3-centimetre disc will be the same thickness as a DVD, but the phase-change material that records the data will be a mere 0.1 millimetres thick, compared to 0.6 millimetres for DVDs. Philips says this should mean there is less risk of beam distortion if the disc tilts when the portable device gets jogged. Portable DVD players won鈥檛 play smoothly if jogged.
This jog-resistance is helped by making the glass and polymer lens that focuses the laser only 1.3 millimetres wide, just one-third the size of the lens in a DVD recorder. This means the optics need be only one-tenth the mass of their counterpart in a DVD, light enough for an electromagnet to keep them steady.
The drive is currently 0.5 centimetres thick, 5.6 centimetres long and 3.4 centimetres wide. The first versions of the disc will store 1 gigabyte on each side, but the dual-layer coating already used for DVDs will double the capacity to 4 gigabytes in total.
Wayne Fletcher at Philips鈥檚 Southampton lab says SFFO will be ready for sale in two years. Chris Buma, who heads Philips鈥檚 optical division at Eindhoven in the Netherlands, says discs can be made for 鈥渁 few cents鈥�. The drives will initially cost around 拢70 but this is expected to fall.
Philips says it was 鈥渏ust coincidence鈥� that DataPlay of Colorado, a firm offering a rival micro disc technology, hit a cash crisis just as Philips decided to come clean about its SFFO technology (see 鈥淎bort, retry, fail?鈥�). DataPlay is designed to record just 250 megabytes per side of a 3.2-centimetre disc, but so far without the option to erase and reuse the disc.
