Our vaporware alert hit yellow earlier this year when Call/Recall bragged about a multi-terabyte optical storage solution while providing no real proof that it existed, but now we're afraid that's been ratcheted up to orange. The latest from the company -- which still seems to believe that no pictures are necessary to substantiate its claims -- is the "industry's first 1TB optical disc." This device has reportedly been developed and tested behind closed doors, and unsurprisingly relies on its own 2-Photon-3D technology. Additionally, the company purports that it is "entering into product design and discussion with leading manufacturing partners," so we ought to see something coming down the pike relatively soon if all of this is legit.

[Via PCLaunches]

Forget single-layer media, that dual-layer stuff that was all the rage last year, and even the triple-layered flavor that got announced just days ago. Heck, even an eight-layer disc would be forced to bow down to the sure-to-be-outdone-soon ten-layer rendition supposedly crafted by Ritek. No sooner than we all celebrated the idea of a 51GB HD DVD, Ritek has reportedly "designed HD media with a full ten layers," not to mention the supposed three- and four-layer coasters it has laying around while working its way up. As if that weren't impressive enough, it also claims that this multi-layer process can be applied to both HD DVD and Blu-ray, a feat that Toshiba's recent creation can't quite compete with. Of course, Ritek officials were quick to point out that the "real barrier to this advancement is the lack of reader / writer laser diodes to support the additional layers," but if there really are 250GB BD discs just waiting to get spun, those lasers aren't too far behind.

[Via Slashdot]

Researchers at Japan's Kyoto University have recently announced a breakthrough method for shaping laser beams that could result in optical disc capacities up to ten times higher than what's current available from state-of-the-art HD DVD and Blu-ray discs. Using several layers of so-called photonic crystals incorporated into a small semiconductor chip, the researchers were able to manipulate a light beam's constituent photons in such a way that the resulting laser output could be shaped into a number of exotic beam patterns -- such as hollow beams, concentric hollow beams, and most importantly for optical disc capacity, solid beams with diameters much smaller than had been previously achievable. The best part about this technology is that the narrow beams can be formed without changing the wavelength of the laser, meaning that the technique could theoretically be applied to existing blue lasers, enabling next-gen optical discs to hold hundreds of gigabytes worth of data. Or, to put this in layman's terms, the $1,000 BD-P1000 you're planning on buying will now be, like, totally obsolete before you even tear open the box.