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New, Flexible CDs Arrive

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the but-I-liked-shattering-CDs dept.

Mortin writes "A company called Flexstorm has developed a new type of CD, dubbed flexCD, that is about 140 microns thick, 1/10th that of a normal CD, and most importantly flexible. The technical specs on this new technology are quite impressive, boasting a weight of only .6 grams on the flexCD 80. Producing a flexCD also only takes .3 seconds, less than that of a normal CD."

5 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. cd's in printed materials by s20451 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm old enough to remember when some books and magazines included analog records printed on sheets of plastic ... particularly music instruction books, and things of that nature. I'm looking forward to the days when you can tear a CD out of your favourite music magazine and listen to it ...

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  2. Re:Best of all by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Being so thin, it can be easily shredded, so there's no further need to keep your financial documents [andersen.com] on paper.

    I don't think that's such a good idea. Anybody with special equipment could probably read whatever's left of the tracks on the shards of CD. One shard could hold many kilobytes of contiguous data; even entire documents.

    Shredding a CD is kind of like printing all of your documents onto a single mile-long roll of paper, then slicing the paper into 1-foot long pieces. You could get a lot of info off of any one chunk.

  3. Flexibility over Practicality by pinkpineapple · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Being flexible presents some advantage in the ad business as it becomes possible to send CD like junk mail. I (don't really) look forward to the days of getting Pre-approved credit card mail on this media. However, the format becomes quickly an inconvienience when you decide to keep and use the media. As an example, I remember when the DVD expert group was debating over as to protect the disc in the casing or not (like the Panasonic PD disk.) They decided not to, to the biggest regret of companies like Blockbuster who are irritating their customers by renting DVD with scratches and digs all over (I've got one of these DVDs with a cigarette burn in it!)

    I really like the tape format, and I enjoy the mini disc (MD) style, allowing me to throw medium on the desk without caring if it will get scratched. The MD format is almost perfect for me. It's smaller than CDs and fit in backpacks. It's too bad that it hasn't become more popular with increase storage and broader adoption by computer manufacturers.

    PPA, the girl next door.

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  4. This is no good for consumers by seldolivaw · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Okay, so have they invented a flexible CD? Not really. All they've done is separated the data layer from the rigid plastic layer, so that people will hopefully own only a few of the rigid "adapters" and loads of the data-handling flexCDs. FlexCDs are (a) easier to break than ordinary CDs (because there's no plastic layer protecting the thin data layer, and (b) place more of the cost of playing CDs on the consumer, since producers won't have to pay for the adapters after a while.

  5. Performance at high RPM? by Ogerman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Since they're less rigid and have less total mass to 'average out' any irregularities, what happens when there's a small variation that slightly unbalances the disc? This wouldn't affect audio players, but I wonder if their stability would be insufficient to handle much higher speeds. I didn't see any specs on average maximum read speed.