The ICI Electronics Ltd subsidiary of chemicals giant ICI Plc has extremely high hopes for its new optical disk medium, which it calls digital paper – and who can be surprised when the company is talking not cents per byte but cents per megabyte of data stored, a half cent per megabyte indeed: the paper-like material is aimed at write-once applications, particularly ones where the data is read once or twice and thrown away – daily updates to price lists and such; the material consists of a 25 micron layer of Melinex substrate on which is laid a dye polymer layer that changes colour when exposed to a laser, and a protective coating to create a material that is durable but handles like paper – and one company that is excited by the new recording material is struggling Iomega Corp, Roy, Utah, which has established a Bernoulli Optical Systems subsidiary to apply its magnetic hard shell floppy disk technology to optical storage.
ICI ELECTRONICS OPTIMISTIC ABOUT ITS DIGITAL PAPERS
