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New Blu-Ray video disk is made of paperA new type of Blu-Ray digital video disk made largely from paper has been developed by Sony and Toppan Printing in Japan. The two companies say such paper-based disks will be cheaper to make and less environmentally harmful.
Blu-Ray disks, considered a successor to conventional DVDs, store data using a blue laser rather than a regular red one. Because the wavelength of the blue laser is smaller, more information can be read from this type of disk.
Data is stored on Blu-Ray disks in the form of tiny ridges on the surface of an opaque 1.1-millimetre-thi ck substrate. This lies beneath a transparent 0.1mm protective layer.
The substrate is normally made from a polycarbonate plastic, which is ultimately derived from crude oil. But Sony and Toppan Printing have replaced this with a mixture of paper and another polymer.
The resulting prototype consists of 51 per cent paper but is still capable of storing up to 25 gigabytes of data. Regular DVDs have less than half this capacity.
"Oil is a limited resource but paper can be recycled," said Sony spokesman Taro Takamine. "One of the initial advantages of the paper disk will be a decrease in the amount of raw material needed to produce a disk."
Another benefit of the paper-based disks is ease of disposal, according to Hideaki Kawai, head of Toppan's R&D division.
more: www.newscientist.com/hottopics/te... (137)
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31/5/2004 | Viewed 5,308 time(s)
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