A NEW type of CD or DVD that is part prerecorded and part blank, ready for
recording, will soon be hitting the shops. Devised by Kodak, the discs will let
you add your own snippets to commercially recorded audio, video or games discs,
and will allow short runs of customised CDs to be made more cheaply. Kodak
likens the discs to a programmable read-only memory (PROM) chip, and is calling
them CD-PROMs or DVD-PROMs.
At present, it is very expensive to make small numbers of customised CDs or
DVDs, as the whole of each disc has to be individually recorded onto a blank.
Making a stamper to press short runs is even pricier. Kodak鈥檚 new discs could
change all that. The stampers used to press them transfer whatever sound, video
or computer data is common to all the discs. At the same time it presses a plain
spiral groove into the remaining blank part of the disc, which is then coated
with a light-sensitive cyanine dye.
Customised sections can then be recorded relatively quickly onto the blank
spiral groove, to produce a disc sporting a mix of pressed and recorded data
that plays like an all-pressed disc. Alternatively, the dyed area can be left
blank for home recording on a personal computer or CD recorder.
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鈥淭his will let people update the content of an optical disc without
cluttering the hard disc on their PC. The update then travels with the removable
disc,鈥� comments Emil Dudeck, director of optical disc technology at Technicolor.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a nice idea if the cost can be kept down.鈥�