Could this be the next Camcorder media??

[paulw]

Tiny optical disc could store five movies

Two years from now the world's smallest optical disc will let your cellphone store five two-hour movies, squirrel away 25,000 digital photos or hoard 48 hours of MP3 music

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp;jsessionid=DFIAJNFJLIKP?id=ns99992930

Then 2 years is a long in tech development..

[Brian Ellis]

More pie-in-the-sky journalism, I'm afraid. How do you get 10 hours of movies on 1 Gb? Filmed with the cheapest webcam?

Typically, a 1 hour DV tape downloads to about 12 Gb, so for equivalent quality, you would get 2.5 minutes of filming per side. Interesting but not practical.

Ah! You say, it's for cellphone applications, so we don't need that quality. Wrong! By the time the disk is ready, cellphones will have LCDSi displays which are capable of pixel sizes down to about 1 µm, at the moment. on a 4 cm wide screen, this means that a horizontal resolution of 40,000 will be possible, although, in practice, it is more likely that it would be something like 1024 x 768 with a 40 µm pixel size, which is about as much as the eye can resolve, unaided. I therefore believe that movies for playing on mobiles would need at least 2 Gb/h compressed with, say, MPEG-2 or -4, so yould get 15 minutes per side on such a disc.

I'm always sceptical about such announcements, especially when made in popular magazines, as opposed to the serious technical journals as a scientific paper. How many have we been promised and never see the light of day (or of a laser )? Perhaps Brian should have been named Thomas

[Patrick]

Say what?

As in Doubting Thomas?

Brian, I think that's the first time I've seen or heard reference to that expression in about 30 years!

[Brian Ellis]

Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
St John ch. 20, v. 29

I'm obviously unblessed, at least as far as mini-discs are concerned

[Dr Mordrid]

It also seems you're even more un-blessed in terms of years than I am to use that old saw

Dr. Mordrid