17 Jun 2002
A US company has developed high-capacity fluorescent multilayer discs (FMD) and drives that are backwards-compatible with existing compact disc (CD) and digital versatile disc (DVD) technology.
Constellation 3D (C3D), based in New York, says that its FMDs can be played on standard players that have had a minor upgrade, and that consumer electronics manufacturers will be able to offer single disc drives to play CD, DVD and FMD media.
The company, which has laboratories in Israel and Russia, claims that its single-sided FMDs have storage capacities of up to 25 Gigabytes - compared to just 650 Megabytes on a conventional CD.
FMD technology is scheduled for introduction into the existing optical disc market at a comparable cost to existing systems in summer 2001.
C3D are also looking to integrate green- and blue-laser technology into their systems in the future for applications requiring higher capacities. Said President and CEO Eugene Levich: "25 Gigabyte capacity discs are sufficient for video and audio libraries, but certain applications, such as digital cinema players and internet streaming servers will require over 70 Gigabytes. We will serve these markets using blue and green laser technology."
Story courtesy of Opto & Laser Europe Magazine.
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