One hour of a movie, at full 35mm film resolution (not "digital cinema") theater quality with no compression, takes 1 terabyte of storage.
With lossless compression, a full 2-3 hour movie takes 1TB.
With mild lossy compression (you won't notice the difference), a whole theater-quality movie could fit on 2-3 of these 100GB discs.
So much technology is arriving ahead of people's perceived need for it.
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FMD: coulda been a contenda
We should also mention here a technology often written up alongside all of the above, namely FMD or fluorescent multilayer disc, from New York-based Constellation 3D.
Instead of the reflective coating found in existing discs, FMD uses fluorescent dyes to coat multiple layers of substrate within each disc. Current DVDs use only two layers on a single-sided disc because the reflective coating causes too much interference for data to be read back. But fluorescent dyes, which don't cause a noise problem, record data by emitting fluorescent light in varying patterns to represent 1s and 0s. FMD increases capacity simply because it uses more of the media in a disc of the same size.
Constellation was promising a DVD-sized disc that could hold 140GB of data using red lasers, or more than a terabyte using blue lasers. Last July, the company seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough when it signed a licensing deal with Warner Advanced Media Operations (WAMO), an AOL subsidiary and one of the world's largest manufacturers of DVDs.
Last July, the company seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough. | |