Imation in the past few days announced what it calls "Tera Angstrom Technology", a new technology regarding tape recorders. Further information have been published by the media leader at this year's NAB Show.
The "tera" refers to terabyte-capacity tape media, and the "Angstrom" to tape particles in the coating that are so tiny they must be measured in ?ngstroms. (One ?ngstrom is one-tenth of a nanometer or one-ten-billionth of a meter).
According to Imation, current advanced data-tape magnetic layers are about 0.3 microns (300nm or 3,000?) thick, and it will be reduced to less than 0.05 microns (50 nm or 500?).
These digital high-capacity tapes can be used of course not only to record and store data, but also for video recording and storage. Several motion pictures have already been produced using only data-tape drives and cartridges (rather than film), and this too is seen as a trend that will develop and grow in the immediate future. Here too, the original image capture will probably be on hard-disk drives, with the edited master finally transferred to tape.