News in the form of a press release sent out by the General touts:

… another major breakthrough in the development of next generation optical storage technology. GE’s research team has successfully demonstrated a micro-holographic material that can support data recording at the same speed as Blu-ray discs. This result builds upon the April 2009 demonstration of a threshold micro-holographic storage material that can support 500 gigabytes of storage capacity in a standard DVD-size disc.

Read more about this new technology; the full press release and how GE intends to use the technology at:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/20/ge-holographic-storage-burns-500gb-discs-at-the-speed-of-a-blu-r/

At Techwaredist we’re keeping track of all the new technologies as they emerge and are excited to offer them to our loyal customers as soon as they are commercially viable.  Thanks for stopping by and please visit this blog again for the latest breaking news and information on the optical disc market.

Thanks to higher demand, profit margins for optical disc makers have increased so far in 2011. CD-R and DVD-r disc prices are expected to rise by 20% in the second half of this year, according to CMC Magnetics chairman Robert Wong, quoted in CENS.com

Ritek, another major optical disc maker in Taiwan, also says that disc prices have been rising this year due to rising material prices. CD-r and DVD-r disc prices are expected to rise further in the third quarter.

Wong said that many Chinese and Taiwanese optical disc makers have been withdrawing from the business, while some Japanese (JVC / Taiyo Yuden) disc makers also stopped production after the massive earthquake in March.

CMC has raised all its disc prices by an average 30% since March.

The supply shortage of CD-R discs has pushed up prices by about 40% since early this year, the first since 2009, Wong said, pointing out that the optical-disc sector has turned into a sellers’ market, a move that will benefit CMC’s future operation. “Flooding orders are filling production lines throughout the year-end. Fourth quarter operations will turn profitable.”

This is big news for CD-r and DVD-r disc manufacturers like CMC which have posted losses the past couple of years.

I read this weekend in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune an interesting article about one of our important vendors – Rimage Corporation of Edina, Minnesota. I have used and sold Rimage thermal disc printers and duplicators for over 10 years.

The article talks about Rimage’s plan to grow their business into “the cloud.” It also states that some of Rimage’s shareholders are not impressed with these plans as many prominent companies are already in this space – IBM, HP, VMware, Amazon, SalesForce.com, etc. These same investors want Rimage to return a large part of the $109 million in cash to their shareholders in the form of a special dividend.

Rimage management has other ideas like using this large cash position to invest and diversifying away from physical disc media into secure digital publishing in the cloud.

It will be interesting to see how this new direction plays out. We wish them the best.

Techware specializes in using, repairing, selling and renting Rimage Everest auto-printers, PrismPlus printers, 8100 and 7100 disc duplicators.

Today Sharp Corp dropped a little press release about a 100GB Rewritable BluRay Disc. As of today the only drive capable of recording data is one of Sharps own – BD-HDW700.

Discs are expected to cost around 58 bucks or 58 cents per Gigabyte of data stored. They should be available to the general public on July 30th.

-Via

A team of scientists working in Japan have discovered a new crystal structure that could pave the way for optical discs with 1000 times more storage than current BluRay Discs.

The material, a new crystal form of titanium oxide, can switch back and forth between the metal and semiconductor states at room temperature when exposed to light, creating an effective on-off function for data storage.

It is “promising as a material for a next-generation optical storage device,” Ohkoshi told AFP by telephone.
-via

Interesting to see lots of activity on a fairly old technology (optical discs) it just goes to show that the utilization of physical media as an archive medium is alive and kicking.]

Photo credit:Flickr user  SDCDeaCerte