Holographic DVD’s

InPhase Technologies, an offshoot of Lucent Technologies ‘ research arm Bell Labs, will be showing the first commercial holographic video recorder at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show this week in Las Vegas. The device uses the company’s Tapestry technology to hold 100GB of data on a single CD-sized write-once disc as a succession of 1.3MB holograms. That’s enough for 20 full-length movies, or 30 minutes of uncompressed high-resolution video.

InPhase says that in addition to very high data densities–the initial product will store twice as much as the theoretical maximum DVD can cope with–the system will be more secure than ordinary storage as the data is distributed throughout the disc, instead of at just one layer or on the surface.