The first commercial 3-dimensional optical disc was released later this year

It is a 300 GB product that Maxell announced will be released in November or December, the same time that InPhase company launched the drive using this technology.

3-D light technology allows saving data to the entire disc, not just the surface like DVD, HD DVD and Blu-ray technologies.Photos: Photoscala .

When it appears on the market at Christmas, the price of each disc using holography will be around $ 120-180, while the disk reader will be very expensive: $ 15,000 each.

Maxell's 3D optical disc - also called HVD disc (Holographic Versatile Disc) - is write-once and has an expected "life span" of 50 years. They expect to increase the disk capacity to 800 GB in 2008 and the next two years will reach 1.6 TB (1,600 GB).

Rich D'Ambrise, Maxell's marketing director, said the company is developing a DVD format containing 10 layers, each with a capacity of 9.4 GB (total disk capacity is 940 GB). Each disk is 92 micrometers (0.092 mm equivalent), which is only about 1/13 thick as a normal DVD.