DVDs threatened by march of Mods

BY OLIVER STALLWOOD FOR a Simpsons fan, owning all 350 episodes on DVD would be a dream come true. But instead of needing scores of boxes, they could have all 8,080 minutes of Homer's life on a single super-disk. For physicists are developing a challenger that could render DVDs obsolete. Optical disks, dubbed Mods or Multiplexed Optical Data Storage, with have a capacity of up to one terabyte. That's 1,000 gigabytes or more than a trillion bytes - enough to hold 472 hours of film on a disk the size of a CD or DVD. The one terabyte disc would be double-sided and dual-layered. But even a single layer Mods with half the capacity could hold the Lord Of The Rings trilogy 13 times over, or all 238 episodes of Friends. The disks would cost roughly the same to make as DVDs, say researchers at Imperial College,London, who are working with experts in Switzerlandand Greece: Under magnification, the surfaces of CDs and DVDs appear as tiny grooves that include 'pits'. But instead of one bit per pit, researchers say they can now encode and retrieve up to ten times the amount of information from a single pit. BluRay disks, with five times the capacity of a DVD, are expected to be released towards the end of 2005. But Mods would hold ten times more than a BluRay. Physicists say the first super-disks could be on sale by 2015,if there is enough demand from the market. [METRO Sep 27,2004]