I think it's a prototype JVC camera... basically a 12 MP camera that shoots at 60 fps, plus sound recording of course. And, IIRC, that's what it's supposed to look like; no one knows for sure because there haven't been displays made capable of showing it yet.
Well... that's a model intended for data archival. I'm not sure we'd see that on movies, if it was ever used for that purpose. Edit: interesting side note, you can buy a 500GB hard drive for $90. This thing is $180 a pop with a burner that costs $18k. So why would anyone buy it? It has a "lifetime" of 50 years, and doesn't degrade at all from use. This is very different from a hard disk. This is more of an industry technology... at least right now.
I used a projector to put a blu-ray on the wall at 110" and it looked great. If you got right up next to the wall you could see some very slight pixilation, but only then. If you were back across the room it looked fantastic. DVD's had to be brought back down to about the 70" to keep them from appearing slightly pixilated, but even when we put a 4:3 tv show at 124 inches it looked pretty good. How much bigger do you want? I don't know a whole lot of people that have walls with more blank space than that at home, at least not in areas where you can put a projector far enough back to create a picture that size.
The important factor isn't as much about "total number of pixels" as "dots per inch". At that size, you get just barely over 20 dpi. For reference, any regular old-ass PC monitor is 96 dpi. Granted, when you are farther back, it's less important. Watching a "wall" of HD signal is not really that great unless you are pretty far back.
I think you have to compare it to 2.5" hard drives or Jazz disks. The media is decidedly more portable than a 3.5" hard drive, cheaper by a ton than Jazz ever was, and much more durable than a 2.5" drive. Sure the reader is expensive, but that price will come down first, similar to how DVD-R drives have fallen by, what, 20x since their introduction, while the media has only fallen 5x.
Hard drives are no professional backup solution IMHO. OK for home use, but personally I wouldn't store important data on something that needs flimsy mechanics to work and is highly sensitive to shock, humidity or changing temperatures. Also, there's always the problem of manipulating data. While 18.000 dollars seems a lot, it's pretty much nothing when you archive, say, PDFs of contracts that go into the millions. The 1st class flight tickets to get the signers all in one place cost decidedly more. And let's be honest here, until these things are widely used and down to a few hundred bucks, a private user simply won't need them. Also, I do see uses in the movie industry. Why compress a movie when you don't have to? In its uncompressed state it's available to all future viewing equipment developments. Question is, does the industry want that? This would definitely be the last disk you buy because you simply can't get better quality than it has been shot in. No more rebuying your faves when a new format comes out.
