Five years ago, Japanese companies were rushing to take licences for Drexler Technology Corp’s optical high capacity data storage card technology and reader-writers, but Canon Inc decided to eschew the pilgrimage to Mountain View, and instead develop its own technology. The Canon Optical Card System uses a Canon proprietary optical recording material and layer composition technology, which will store up to 2Mb on a credit-card sized plastic card. Data is read with the RW-10 laser reader-writer, which uses a semiconductor laser a few microns in diameter to form pits in the surface of the card, which can then be read by scanning the card with a lower power laser and detecting the pits with a photo sensor. The cards can be written at up to 15.3Kbps, the reading speed is 100Kbps, the access time is between 23mS and 2.5 seconds, and Canon looks to have the things on the market in 1991, and expects to charge about $4 for the cards, $1,600 for the reader-writers.
