A new type of Blu-Ray digital video disk made largely from paper has been developed by Sony and Toppan Printing in Japan. The two companies say such paper-based disks will be cheaper to make and less environmentally harmful.
Blu-Ray disks, considered a successor to conventional DVDs, store data using a blue laser rather than a regular red one. Because the wavelength of the blue laser is smaller, more information can be read from this type of disk.
Data is stored on Blu-Ray disks in the form of tiny ridges on the surface of an opaque 1.1-millimetre-thick substrate. This lies beneath a transparent 0.1mm protective layer.
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The substrate is normally made from a polycarbonate plastic, which is ultimately derived from crude oil. But Sony and Toppan Printing have replaced this with a mixture of paper and another polymer.
Limited resource
The resulting prototype consists of 51 per cent paper but is still capable of storing up to 25 gigabytes of data. Regular DVDs have less than half this capacity.
鈥淥il is a limited resource but paper can be recycled,鈥� said Sony spokesman Taro Takamine. 鈥淥ne of the initial advantages of the paper disk will be a decrease in the amount of raw material needed to produce a disk.鈥�
Another benefit of the paper-based disks is ease of disposal, according to Hideaki Kawai, head of Toppan鈥檚 R&D division 鈥淪ince a paper disk can be cut by scissors easily, it鈥檚 simple to preserve data security when disposing of the disk,鈥� Kawai says.
The disk will be demonstrated and details of the production process revealed at the Optical Data Storage 2004 conference being held in California, US, between 18 and 21 April.