Recordable or Write-one, CDs (CD-R) were launched on the market in 1990, quickly followed by multiple re-writable discs (CD-RW). These were 1X systems, meaning that recording a disc and reading it back worked at the same speed as standard Audio CDs. Today, a CD-ROM can be read 48 times faster (48X), and recently Philips realized the same speed for writing CD-R discs. CD-RW is quickly following suite, and a similar High-Speed race is taking off for DVD systems. Benno Tieke explains what it takes to write and erase bytes with micrometre precision and at a speed of 200 km/h... Vision

‘The high-speed race in optical recording has quite a clear finish line, set by mechanical limits up to which we can accelerate the rotation speed of optical discs’, says Benno Tieke. ‘For reading both CD and DVD, we have more or less reached that limit, and the same is true for recording write-once CD (CD-R).We have not yet reached the limit for recording rewritable CD and write-once and rewritable DVD, but the ultimate goal is to be able to write these discs as fast as we can read them. When we have achieved that, the high-speed race will be over. Getting there first has the advantage that you can set the standards for the technology to be used in the future’.

The article continues:

DVD

While CD-R and CD-RW are in the midst of the high-speed race, the quest for higher-X recording DVD has taken off more recently. DVD+RW has been introduced by Philips as a video recorder, with recording speeds of 1x to 2.4x, and work towards higher speed is underway. In 2001, the DVD+R format was introduced as the write-once counterpart of DVD+RW, which should rapidly lead to recording speeds of 10x and beyond.

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