Unbelievable - Very high density, paper based storage?

This deccan Herald story is truly unbelievable. A student has used a very different approach (of geometric figures to pack more data) and print them on paper. When scanned, one can retrieve the contents back. And what sizes are we talking about? You get an idea here:

In a demo at his college laboratory, this author could see text typed on 432 pages of foolscap paper being stored in a four square inch paper. The author was even shown a 45-second video clip of a Malayalam film stored on an ordinary paper piece.

This seems to be a legitimate news because (a) Deccan Herald is respected news paper, and (b) The approach seems to be new, and probably not tried out before.

So if we try to analyze the paper based data storage, using regular scanners and printers we get in market (and assuming no loss, which in any case can be compensated by good encoding techniques), here is a guess about best of parameters that one would expect:

• About 10^2 distinct geometric shapes per 'location'
• About 10^3 distinct colours
  
• About 10x10 pixels for one geometric shape
• You have about  10^3x10^3 dpi (best achievable printing/scanning, given that we have about 4800x1200 today) pixels.  That is about 10^4 locations per square inch.
  

So basically we have about 10^4 * 10^2 * 10^3 = 10^9 bits that you can accomodate in square inch.  And that is approx. 1GB, or about 100Megabytes.  Give or take an order or two of magnitude, and you have at least 1 Megabytes per square inch. And that was what was the kind of numbers which were reported.

So it seems like there is indeed some potential!



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