What do you see as the successor to optical media?

[Agent]

Flash memory in terms of consoles? As i said, Nintendo have been doing it for years - who's to say somewhere down the line they'll switch back.

Nope, Nintendo have been using ROMs for ages
Sometimes a game would have a small amount of flash on-board for games saves, bit this was usually in the region of a few KB for older generations and a few MB at most for recent ones.

ROM has always been much cheaper than Flash based memory. Flash has plummeted in recent times, so I'm not sure what the price difference is now though

[Whiternoise]

Ah right, thanks for clearing that up Agent.

But what i mean is, we've used cartridge style media for years and no problems with it really.

[Kumagoro]

I think for films and games etc very cheap and robust flash type ROM will be used rather than
proper flash memory. I have read about it before but cant remember any particular examples.

Going from DVD to blu ray is only a factor of about 10? 4.7Gb to 50GB, then perhaps the next
optical disc will be around 500 GB. Given how long it took to go from DVD to blu ray and the
speed at which flash density is growing then optical discs wont have the extra capacity to make
them particularly attractive I think.

[Funkstar]

SanDisk were speaking about a write once flash memory technology a couple of years ago, but I haven't heard anything about it recently.

BluRay can reach 200GB or perhaps 250GB in the lab, no idea if these multiple layer disks will ever make it to production though.

[ACiD303]

Pioneer 16 Layer (400GB) Blu-Ray

[blueball]

pen and paper

[Agent]

Holographic data storage looks great....if they can get the cost down and mass produce them

[Bunjiweb]

Ive wondered why memory stick manufacturers haven't cottoned on to the fact that you could fit a full high-def movie on an 8gb stick, certainly a 16gb... Does this not look as pheasible as downloadable content?

Ben