Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Shrimp's eye points way to better DVDs

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Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 10-25-2009, 06:01 PM:

Ok, Here is a new twist to reading back DVDs. I wonder what SOny will call this system??? Oh boy, so if they develop a higher quality DVD than what we all have now does that also mean another whole new TV system??? [Roll Eyes]

Article

LONDON (Reuters) – The amazing eyes of a giant shrimp living on Australia's Great Barrier Reef could hold the key to developing a new type of super high-quality DVD player, British scientists said on Sunday.

Mantis shrimps, dubbed "thumb splitters" by divers because of their vicious claws, have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom.

They can see in 12 primary colors, four times as many as humans, and can also detect different kinds of light polarization -- the direction of oscillation in light waves.

Now a team at the University of Bristol have shown how the shrimps do it, using remarkable light-sensitive cells that rotate the plane of polarization in light as it travels through the eye.

Manmade devices do a similar thing in DVD and CD players but they only work well for one color, while the shrimp's eye operates almost perfectly across the whole visible spectrum from near ultra-violet to infra-red.

Transferring the same multi-color ability into a DVD player would result in a machine capable of handling far more information than a conventional one.

"The mechanism we have found in this eye is unknown to human synthetic devices. It works much, much better than any attempts that we've made to construct a device," researcher Nicholas Roberts told Reuters.

He believes the "beautifully simple" eye system, comprising cell membranes rolled into tubes, could be mimicked in the lab using liquid crystals.

Details of the mantis shrimp research were published in the journal Nature Photonics.

Just why the mantis shrimp needs such a rarefied level of vision is unclear, although researchers suspect it is to do with food and sex.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 10-25-2009, 06:52 PM:

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
I wonder what SOny will call this system???

I wonder what TOshiba will call their wimpy, no-frills version of this system???

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 10-25-2009, 08:18 PM:

What the hell does that article have to do with Sony? It doesn't mention Sony at all.

It looks to me like someone is reaching just a little in order to gripe about Sony.

Posted by Bruce Hansen (Member # 281) on 10-25-2009, 10:19 PM:

But, would you have to feed the shrimp in your player every day? What if you went away, and did not feed the shrimp for a week? Would your whole house stink from the dead shrimp when you returned home? [puke]

If the shrimp had babies, would you be able to put them in your exsisting players? [Big Grin]

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 10-26-2009, 10:30 AM:

You're not too far off Bobby. The lens cleaner disk refuses to eject from my BDPieceofcrap player. Now I have to remove the whole drive and plug it into an IDE port on some other computer so it will eject. This happened once before with a CD-ROM disk it didn't like. My Toshiba HD-DVD player has never done this as a matter of fact!

Mark

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 10-26-2009, 02:05 PM:

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
Just why the mantis shrimp needs such a rarefied level of vision is unclear, although researchers suspect it is to do with food and sex.

And that's what makes us better than shrimp. We need money, too;>

Posted by Jarret Chessell (Member # 5077) on 10-26-2009, 05:43 PM:

I bet the Apple version of "shrimp disc" will come in a really nice box.

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 10-26-2009, 06:10 PM:

Yea, but MArtin... SHrimp are on the money trail too... just the other way round. They sell for lots of money! JOe, I think yOur O key is stuck...

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 10-26-2009, 07:34 PM:

I am curious as to why you would stick a lens cleaning disc into the BD player. I have never needed to use one of those with any optical reader ever. As for the CD-ROM, did it have a label on it?

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 10-26-2009, 10:15 PM:

Was having problems with the BDPieceofshit reading a regular DVD. I've also had problems with two other players in the 12 years I've lived here as well as many DTS drives with lenses getting cloudy. The cleaning disk always takes care of it. The CD-ROM did not have a label and it generally plays those disks fine. Don't forget we are in the area known as the Great Basin which is a rather dusty desert and it IS dusty here!! Getting the drive to pop open is just matter of connecting it to an IDE port on any computer... er excuse me...puter. But SOny should have made a provision for that some other way.

Mark

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 10-26-2009, 10:24 PM:

What I would do is install an external IDE connection and a switch. The switch re-routes the connection to internal or external. So when the disc gets stuck, flip the switch and connect that IDE cable. Easy as pie!

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 10-26-2009, 10:27 PM:

Yes, good idea and easy to do. It is kind of a pain to take the thing apart... fortunately this is only the seocond time this has happened.