New, Flexible CDs Arrive

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."

Comments

Best of all

[SVDave]

Being so thin, it can be easily shredded, so there's no further need to keep your financial documents on paper.

cd's in printed materials

[s20451]

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 ...

Re:cd's in printed materials

[BigBlockMopar]

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.

"Sound Sheets", they were called.

Memories:

• "Sound Sheets should not be used with automatic record changers."
• "Place Coin Here If Sound Sheet Slips"

I remember as a kid, when Pierre Elliot Trudeau did that big constitution thing with the queen back in 1981, the newspaper came with Sound Sheets of the Canadian national anthem. Somewhere, I still have that and a few other sound sheets.

One of them is a little mutilated. At the ripe old age of 7, I *had* to know what would happen if I put it onto the old BSR record changer.

And now, it's consoling that a new generation shall know the horror.

An adaptor?

[diablochicken]

According to the specifications, this would require an adaptor to play in existing CD drives.

If they're pushing this as a supplement to advertisements (distribution via mail, magazine, what have you), how are they going to get the adapters to people? How are they going to overcome the barrier of getting people to actually use the adapters?

Seems like there's a bit of a bottleneck in this biz plan.

Re:An adaptor?

[b0rken]

They can just give 'em out for free at Radio Shack!

Re:thin and flexible is great but...

[wadetemp]

The AOL CDs I get in the mail don't hold up very well either. They tend to break on the second or third (accidental) bending. They also scratch very easily, especially if I accidentally scratch them with a razor blade. Finally, after being broken in half and scratched, they don't make very good frisbees. I was kind of hoping for better things from this flexible format.

Jar Openers

[cybermage]

Cool, If we could get AOL to send these out, I'll have a collection of jar openers to go with my coasters.

Re:Why this will fail

[jridley]

Actually, I like caddies. I'm kinda pissed that I couldn't buy a caddy drive when I built my new Athlon XP last week. The old caddy drive was 2X and I just couldn't live with the speed anymore, so I had to cave and get a tray drive. Ugh.

Try giving games to 3 year olds and see how long the CDs last. Then put them in caddies and see how long they last (hint: case 1, about 3 days, case 2, 6 years and counting).

Flexibility over Practicality

[pinkpineapple]

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.

Performance at high RPM?

[Ogerman]

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.

specs converted from pdf to html

[Khopesh]

in case you hate pdfs that could easily be done in html, adobe has a pdf->html page.

here's the specs in html.

basically, there are two flexCDs, named 80 and 120 for their sizes in milimeters. The 8cm disk holds 200mb and the 12cm disk holds an unspecified amount (hopefully 702mb). each disk is 1/10th the thickness of a cd. standard minicd is 8cm and standard cd is 12cm. a 3.5" floppy is 9cm x 9.4cm.

the adapter has two parts which sandwich the flexCD and go in the non-supporting cdrom drive.