Rainbow technology is a curious one, juxtaposing the old with the new: paper and digital data. It's a system that uses normal paper to store huge amounts of data.
An Indian scientist called Sainul Abideen from the MES College of Engineering, Kerala, developed the technology, which uses various tiny coloured shapes -- printed on plastic or paper -- to store data. And he has claimed his Rainbow technology will be able to store 2.7GB of data on a 25mm-square piece of paper.
And he's demonstrated a working system. He compressed a 45-second audio clip on to a plain sheet of A4 paper. And 450 pages of plain text (roughly 1.47MB of data) was stored on to a 25mm square of the same material. Hardly 2.7GB, but it's a start.
In our previous coverage of Mr Abideen's work, we quickly pointed out some of the obvious problems: paper is easily damaged and decays over time, and whatever algorithmic compression technique he has developed for use within this technology would have to be far more impressive than this Rainbow printer itself.
It'll come as no surprise that you can't buy a Rainbow printer yet. And we're not holding our breath. But it's a nice idea.
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