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A new optical technology for data storage
Posted on 26/11/06 01:35 by geno 888
The Rainbow method uses geometric shapes instead of ones and zeros, such as squares and hexagons to represent data patterns. Color is also used in the system to represent other data elements.
Like CD and DVD discs, a piece of hardware is necessary to read data from the support, and the good news is that a plain scanner is sufficient. A dedicated software then translates pictures into digital data.
Using a plastic sheet instead of paper can improve durability over time.
As always, feel free to discuss this argument in our forum :)
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PAPER!....NOOOoooo....what will happen to all the trees of the world..... 
...on a side note....GREAT inventions tho....
...on a side note....GREAT inventions tho....
Paper we know can last centuries.
Optical media (CDs, DVDs) ?????
PS: I think I have seen something like this before. Maybe the news is the amount of data stored, and the use of color.yes, considering paper has been used for data (text) storage for centuries, yeah, most likely you've seen something like that before.. 
If this is real and not theory, and assuming a printer can print the colors/shapes on the paper then all he has to do is release his program and I can backup my data tonight. I reckon most people have color printers not so sure about scanners but if not a combo unit can be had for $60 or less.
I would like for once to see one of these type fantastical stories prove marketable in under a decade. This one, if true, should be marketable tonight only requiring a software download. I'm sure someone who can invent such a concept can manage to figure out how to sell software on the web.
There was an attempt 20 or 30 years ago in Byte or Creative Computing magazine to send out programs and data in a column on the side of the page about an inch or 2 wide.
This was to save you from having to enter the data manually, and seemed like a good idea.
Don't know what the storage was but it didn't take up much area, compared with what the text took up.
There was no color and I think the shape was dots. It didn't last very long probably because of the hardware needed to read it.Cool - As long as I can utilize Scotch tape to repair it when it rips, then -=ItZaLLgOoD=-. 
I'm afraid that consumer printer inks are not so durable. Maybe the paper will last decades, the colors certainly won't.
Reality check: Is this feasible using current printing and scanning technology? NO!
Forget the printing side of the problem and consider the scanning side. If we use one of today's scanners and pretend that it perfectly implements it's specifications, then we have a scanner with a resolution of e.g. 9600x9600 DPI and a 48 bit (6 byte) resolution of the colour of each dot. If we scan a piece of A4 paper (the European euivalent of Letter format) we can have approx. 8x11 inches on a piece of paper.
Regardless of the colours and shapes printed on that paper, the scanner will be able to return a digital representation of the whole piece of paper using this many bytes:
9600x9600x8x11x6 bytes = 48.3 GiByte
Regardless of how the shapes and colours are encoded/decoded it's impossible for a scanner with these specs to return more than this amount of uncompressed information from one piece of A4 paper.
Compression cannot magically improve on this amount of data from 48.3 GiByte to 450 GByte.
In reality consumer scanners are not that precise and cannot accurately resolve 9600x9600 DPI in 48 bit colour.
So there's no way that the 450 GB on one piece of paper is achieveable using current scanning technology, unless the piece of paper is as large as your dinner table.
"So there's no way that the 450 GB on one piece of paper is achieveable using current scanning technology, unless the piece of paper is as large as your dinner table."
Anything is possible. The guy said he used shapes to represent data as well as color; so unless you know something about the technical details of his project, we can only speculate as to how data is stored on a piece of paper using the method the guy came up with.Well, considering how scanners nowadays are able to scan letters and create a digital text file (considering it's legible), I can't imagine why scanning shapes and colors and decoding them on the fly is so impractical..
Too often the deciding facvtor of a storage technology is not the technology itself, but its feasibility for adoption; this one deosnt sounds too good even on paper 
Has it mention vision spectrum ink? The inventor doesnt seems to have consider how the data access method is going to use, it does not seems to be even a sequential data access, unless a specialised scanner is used; but that seesm to be quite impossible and would be painfully slow on existing technologies. So a batch processing of 450GB data, lol, i dont have that much of prohibitive memory buffer Just think...You can backup your hard drive and CDs to an 8x11 page of colored dots and instead of printing them out to actual paper you print them out to a PDF. Your entire HD backup to a 10 page PDF doc.
Your entire HD backup to a 10 page PDF doc.I'm just wondering what kind of copy-protection technics will be made for this media and what would be the solution [a piece of paper can allways be scaned or photographed]. For sure the data rates gonna be high
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