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Ok, ok…so you can’t go to Newegg and buy it just yet.  But GE announced just today that they’ve made some huge steps forward in the whole process, and now just have to figure out how to make their lab success work in affordable mass-produced products.

Talk about the the ultimate in space saving!  I think they will get to take over that slogan from the Tupperware people (or whoever has it right now).  Richard Doherty, an analyst at the technology research firm Envisioneering says that “This could be the next generation of low-cost storage.”

This “low-cost storage” is built on holographic technology.  More and more on things like credit cards, you are seeing those 3D images on the card being used for security reasons.  With holography, it can store the 1’s and 0’s of digital data also.  The stored data is encoded in light patterns in light sensitive material.  Then, to read the recorded data, the holograms act like a mirror letting you see the refracted light patterns.  When a laser is shined on them, voila!  Magic.  The data “appears” and can be pulled and deciphered.

Although the potential of holographic technology has been known for quite some time, since the early 1960s as a matter of fact, it hasn’t become the road most traveled mainly due to cost factors.  But with this latest development by GE, many analysts believe that could be changing.  This is due in large part to GE researchers taking the path less traveled in their approach.  They use what is called microholographic storage.  This storage depends on less complex, tinier holograms than previously concentrated on.

The biggest challenge for the research team was to find a way to allow these smaller holograms to reflect enough light.  Their GE lab in NY made the breakthrough—use a 200-fold increase in the reflective power.  This increase puts them at the lower range of light reflections that are readable by current Blu-ray players.  “We’re in the ballpark,” said Brian Lawrence, the scientist who leads GE’s holographic storage program. “We’ve crossed the threshold so we’re readable.”

With this approach, the holograms are scattered over the disc kind of like they are on CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.  So, the same player could read them all.  The big difference here is storage.  While a standard DVD holds 5-9 gigabytes of data, and a Blu-ray comes in 25 or 50-gigabytes flavors, a microholographic disc could hold a whopping 500 gigabytes.

But of course, the bottom line to many is “how much is this gonna cost?”  When Blu-ray first came out in 2006, it cost about $1 a gigabyte for a 25-gigabyte disc.  It’s about half that now.  GE predicts that when their product is introduced (and they are thinking about 2011 or 2012), that holographic discs are going to cost way less than that…more like 10 cents per gigabyte..and keep falling.

They plan to market and sell to places like TV networks, medical researchers and movie studios before heading on to the corporate and consumer market.  But they believe the time is near.  And I think Bert Hesselink, a Stanford professor and expert in the field summed it up well. ““If this can really be done, then GE’s work promises to be a huge advantage in commercializing holographic storage technology.”

via: nytimes