CES 2010: Final Thoughts

The Consumer Electronics show, the behemoth of tech, the Valhalla of gadgetry, has come and gone for yet another year. But this time, rather than arriving with a bang, it slinked into sight with something more like a whimper. CES…

CES 2010: Day 1 Round-Up

With CES 2010 now well under way, it can be pretty tough keeping track of all the latest announcements. Here's Tech Digest's round-up of the of best Day 1 at CES 2010 so far, including all the news from the…

10TB optical discs coming in the next five years

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All plans for slightly bigger DVDs have been blown out of the water today with claims from a group of scientists that they can store up to 10TB of data on a single disc.

The team of egg heads from the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, has added the dimensions of colour and light polarization and employed them to store the huge amounts of extra information. Confused? I’ll do my best to explain.

The colour is the tricky part. How can you store information in colour? I know. Weird. Well, the deal is that the surface is made of gold nanorods and these nanorods react differently to different kinds of light. Colours are, of course, different kinds of light of varying wavelengths, so you can record multiple amounts information on the same nanorods. Capiche? Yeah, bit of a mind melter.

The slightly simpler one to get your head around is the polarized light. You can filter light such that the waves are in a single unified orientation. You can then record onto the discs many time over, each time using light that is polarized in a different direction, and, between these two methods, it takes data storage into crazy land. The Aussie boffins have already been signed up by Samsung and are thought to have produced a 1.6TB version just to prove it works.

A 10TB incarnation could hold something like 300 feature films or a quarter of a million songs – something to terrify and excite pirates and record and film producers in equal measure.

Fortunately, the gold in these nanorods doesn’t seem to make this invention prohibitively expensive with each disc costing a matter of pence. What could be a problem, though, is the kind of hyper disc players we might need to decode all this light and colour nonsense and exactly how long it might take to read and write one of the things. Still, faskinating stuff.

(via PC Pro)

Samsung promise "Fastest Colour Laser Printer"

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We don’t often do printers round these parts any more, being total converts to the paperless office. In fact, it’s been ages since I physically wrote something on paper. Occasionally, though, you do have to print something out, so you’ll need a printer.

When you do, you don’t want to be hanging around, so I thought I’d share the news that Samsung has invented its fastest ever colour printer – the CLP-770ND. This baby can pump out 32 pages per minute, with the first one showing up just 11 seconds after you hit the ‘print’ button.

You’re unlikely to want this thing in your house – it’s aimed more at the corporate world – but it packs an 80GB hard drive and 720MHz processor, if high specs are what you want from a printer. It comes with 256MB of memory onboard, expandable to 1GB if you want things even faster.

The CLP-770ND will be out in June, and cost an unannounced amount. Expect the toner cartridges to cost you a vast amount more.

Google adds colour filter to image search

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Google’s always tweaking its products, and the latest tweak is to Image Search. It’s added the option to filter search results by colour – offering you 12 options for which hue you’d like to dominate your results – red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, pink, white, grey, black and brown.

The update is still filtering out to data centres worldwide, but in the meantime you can use the filter manually by typing something along the lines of “http://images.google.com/images?q=bird&imgcolor=red” in the URL box. The tech comes from Google’s acquisition of Neven Vision, so expect to see a few more updates like this in the near future.

(via Google Operating System)