iD Photo stands for "Intelligent Disc" and Sanyo intends it to be their future storage solution for upcoming digital cameras, small video cameras and possible MP3 players, as well as other portable devices.

The iD Photo disc technology was developed collaboratively by Sanyo, Hitachi, Olympus and Maxell, and you can bet that there will be a host of new two and three mega-pixel digital cameras out by the end of 2000 that take advantage of the new storage format.

The root of iD Photo disc's impressive storage capacity lies in its Magneto-Optical technology heritage. By using a .6mm thick single sided disk with Central Aperature Detection (CAD) magnetic super-resolution, over 1,800 pictures taken at a true-color resolution of 1600x1200 can be stored on a single disc.

This type of storage capacity far surpasses even the new 340MB Compact Flash Type II micro-hard drive from IBM that some companies have begun supporting in their high-end digital cameras.

iD Photo compatible cameras will begin to appear by the end of this summer.

Sharky Extreme opinion: With digital camera resolutions climbing past 1600x1200x32bpp, it's nice to know that there are new storage formats arriving on the scene that are small in size, but can hold massive amounts of data.

We talked to an engineer at Sanyo who told us that the consortium of developers behind the small iD Photo disc are confident that by the middle of 2001 they'll be able to stuff over 1.5GB of information on iD Photo discs.

It gets even better.

By using newly developed lasers, the iD Photo disc will be able to store up to 3.5GB of data by the year 2003.

That outpaces the timeline for Sony's Memory Stick storage increases as well as Panasonic's SD Memory Cards, both of which will barely be cracking the 1GB barrier by mid-2002. With 3.5GB of storage space, ultra-small recreational grade video cameras could be built around the iD Photo disc format, offering up to two hours of better-than-VHS grade recording potential per disc.

Good stuff for both amateur and professional photographers to be sure.