CD’s initially started off as music on discs or audio format in the mid-to-late 1980’s. CD-R’s (R means recordable) then became popular when being produced cheaply. CD ROM’s (ROM means Read Only Memory) then shortly followed to provide data discs for computers which can not be written on.
CD-Rs – written to once only. This obviously didn’t help if you had made a mistake in creating your CD and was a waste of a disc, which was expensive back in those days. Unlike a cassette, where you could record over and over (do you know anyone who still owns a cassette these days?). Therefore, the CD-RW (CD-Rewritable) was created which means you could write over the data several times. The discovery of CD duplication and CD copying has also helped to keep the compact disc alive.
CDs today are used in all sorts of industries today. Obviously, the music industry is the main source of most of the discs we have around the house. However, over the past 5 years, CDs have become an essential tool for marketing, selling, promoting, learning, informing and many, many more. Examples are:
Promotional CDs – marketing companies use them as handy aids to distribute either by post, or to hand them out at conferences
Music/Audio – Artists use them to record albums and also use as language learning aids.
Training – You can put a whole training manual onto 1 CD which is far cheaper to produce and much easier to send.
Software – This is the most used second to music.
These are but just a few uses for CDs.
We all receive CDs in the post as part of product recognition or sales. Newspapers give us freebies with either music or software. CD printing has allowed these forms of marketing to be customized to improve the effectiveness of the overall campaigns. At the moment the demand for CDs is on the increase and looks to remain that way for the next few years anyway. However, just as it’s predecessor, the cassette, the CD may be superseded by the USB stick.
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1 type of optical disc is the Compact Disc (CD) which come in various formats. The most commonly used are the Audio CDs, which can hold up to 80 mins of audio that will play in most hi-fi CD players. 78 minutes is the maximum playing time, 4 seconds is the minimum track duration and 99 tracks is the maximum number of tracks which can be held on a CD. These also have the capacity to hold, 400 hi-res pictures, 140 short/average length songs and computer data of up to 750MB. On top of this, CD duplication, CD copying and CD printing can all be implemented using compact discs to backup, duplicate and customize information stored on a CD.
Video CD (VCD) and Super Video CD (SVCD) are another 2 formats of CD’s. VCD hold video and audio content (like a small film but the quality is low) and SVCD is a much a higher quality version.
The CD’s used for production are white-faced printable discs. These can be used for inkjet, screen and litho CD printing. These usually measure 120 x 120mm with a centre-hole diameter of 22mm. These have superseded the discs with a centre-hole measuring 37mm. There is a “little brother” to this type of disc which is exactly the same but smaller. These measure 80mm across, with a centre-hole diameter of 15mm. The other format is silver discs. Although some printers can print colour onto silver discs, the most common process for printing onto silver discs is Thermal.