Ah, holographic storage -- you've held so much promise for cheap optical media since you were first imagined in research papers published in the early 60s. Later today, GE will be trying to keep the dream alive when it announces a new technique that promises to take holographic storage mainstream. GE's breakthrough in microholographics -- which, as the name implies, uses smaller, less complex holograms to achieve three-dimensional digital storage -- paves the way for players that can store about 500GB of data on standard-sized optical discs while still being able to read DVD and Blu-ray media. Better yet, researchers claim a price of about 10 cents per gigabyte compared to the nearly $1 per gigabyte paid when Blu-ray was introduced. The bad news? We're talking 2011 or 2012 by the time microholographics devices and media are introduced and even then it'll only be commercialized for use by film studios and medical institutions. In other words, you'll likely be streaming high-def films to your OLED TV long before you have a microholographic player in the living room.

Update: And out pops the press release.

When Pioneer first introduced its unicorn-like 16-layer 400GB Blu-ray Disc, we weren't sure if the thing would make it beyond the drawing board, let alone be compatible with existing BD decks. Over at the IT Month Fair in Taipei, Pioneer showed up to showcase the capacious disc, and better still, a DigiTimes report asserts that these are indeed compatible with Blu-ray readers already on the market. Currently, the 400GB disc is slated to hit mass production sometime between now and 2010, while rewritable versions won't hit until 2010 to 2012. Not like it really matters though -- a 1TB disc is on track for 2013, and you know you'll be waiting for the latest and greatest.

Now here's a rate of progress we could get used to. Nary a month after Pioneer trumpeted a 400GB Blu-ray Disc, out pops another press release from the firm boasting about a 500 gigger with a score of layers. Based on research at its Tokyo headquarters, specifications have been drafted for an incredibly capacious 500GB BD. Granted, this very company already had plans for a 500GB optical disc nearly four years ago, but there's no time like the present to make this stuff a reality, right?

[Via TrustedReviews, thanks xdragon]