Audio Video News

The year is 2208. The bad news: the earth is so toxic that even intergalactic invaders avoid the planet like the plague, which in fact is rampant here. The good news: Your great, great, great, great, great grandchildren can be bored out of their minds (while living in their small plastic barrels buried at the Martian north pole) watching old videos of your summer vacation in Oklahoma City.

Thanks to Japanese disc specialist Delkin, those old BD-R discs will still play just fine. In particular, Delkin has announced its Archival Gold BD-R discs, said to last 200 years (or 200,000,000 miles, whichever comes first). Because your time is valuable, the discs feature a 4x read/write time, allowing you to burn 25 GB (that's about 33 CD-Rs, folks) in only 23 minutes.

One 200-year disc will run you about $27, and for the data-intensive users, a spindle of 25 discs costs about $575. So, the data you save better be pretty damn important.

I suppose that archival discs are a good thing, particularly for governments and libraries and other institutions that need to preserve records for perpetuity, or until the government is overthrown. For the rest of us, a 200-year data guarantee is cool, but if there's a problem, I suspect you'll need to show your sales receipt. Good luck hanging onto that. And don't forget to buy a BD player with a 200-year guarantee too. -Ken C. Pohlmann

Delkin