256GB on an A4 Paper Sheet

Just when the idea of storing data on a paper sheet was about to completely disappear from the picture (again), an Indian designer just announced that he has found a way to store about 256GBs of data on an A4 sized piece of paper. Nice thing and if you think that it can actually store that amount of data using just a high speed printer and a capable scanner you'll see that this storage technique may prove very competitive.

Sainul Abideen has developed a way to encode the data into colored geometric shapes and stored in dense patterns on paper.

The method can actually store text, images, sounds and even video clips as colored circles, triangles, and squares and then prints them on a paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch. If the printed paper is read on a high definition scanner, it can be decoded and even played.

The technology called 'Rainbow' by its inventor works because the Abideen thinks that printing text on a paper uses only a small percent of the potential space. The form of encoding developed by him uses the surface in a more space-effective manner, resulting in a denser image covering the sheet itself. Furthermore, the encoding procedure can be enhanced and capacities even larger than 256GB can be achieved on a single A4 paper in the near future.

Abideen has shown off a 45-second video clip that has been encoded onto a paper "video disk" and also delivered the content of 432 A4 pages onto a 4 square-inches paper. No details regarding the transfer rates of such a device were released.