Coating Promises Scratch-Proof CDs, DVDs, LCDs

13.7BillionYears writes "NewScientist reports that TDK has developed a transparent polymer for LCD screens and optical media that is impervious to general neglect and abuse. Quoth the reporter, 'In one of the most convincing technology demonstrations this reporter has witnessed, I was handed a CD, a wire-wool pan scourer and some permanent marker pens, and invited to scratch or mark the discs. Hard as I tried, I could not make a single mark on the disc with the scourer. And the ink simply wiped off.' The coating is apparently responsible for Blu-Ray's new caddy-less form factor."

Comments

For cars too?

[fembots]

If this can be applied to cars when coming out of factory, it'll save a lot of 'disagreement' with supermarket trollies.

There's no mention of price, and more importantly, the ease of removal if this protective coating is somehow scratched. I find the current PDA sheet very difficult to remove (as if you're about to pull the LCD out).

And will record companies do more to prevent "backup" copies now that you simply can't scratch your CDs anymore??

Re:For cars too?

[Lumpy]

to hell with consumer uses.

why has this not been applied to aircraft? the plastic windows and canopies on aircraft are notorius for being super easy to scratch and always having some kind of scratches in them even when the utmost care is taken with them.

Hell, a car windshield made out of plastic would be far superior to the glass we have today. It would revolutionize the automotive industry in designs alone! a wrap around "jetsons" type of car would be possible.

Re:For cars too?

[jxs2151]

...Sony-Ericsson released a similar plastic coating for the screen of their new phones...

So does that mean that I can take that plastic cover off now?

Re:For cars too?

[CajunArson]

Dude... They already did that back in the 80's.
See, there was this guy who looked a lot like David Hasselhoff, and he had this sweet camaro dipped in this stuff that made it impervious to any attack. I think the car's name was KITT or something. Anyway, they had many interesting adventures but while KITT was never scratched on the outside, they never could get Hasselhoff's perma-whitefro shedding out of the upholstry.

Re:For cars too?

[karnal]

camaro

You mean Firebird, or more specifically, a Trans-Am. From what I remember reading, they had 13-some cars just in case they broke one... which did happen.

Did you ever notice that for the "car action" scenes, most of the footage was re-used ("turbo boost" stuff)...

I am somewhat sad at myself for still having a weak spot for a shiny black T/A - especially those model years. My friends call me white trash because of it.

Re:For cars too?

[Open_The_Box]

The aircraft thing is probably a good idea - depends how the coating responds to extremes of cold. The last thing you want is for your windows suddenly to turn opaque at 30000 feet. But, y'know, if it passes this basic test...

Plastic windows on your car... probably not such a great idea - the problem with car windows is that they are designed to shatter into tiny pieces rather than large jagged chunks that can rupture organs and generally shred the passengers in the event of a crash. Glass is cheap and does the job well. Cool as it would be to have wrap around windows, I reckon the auto companies will be unlikely to shell out the development cash.

Re:For cars too?

[System.out.println()]

Accidental microwavings
Well, accidental? I always microwave them on purpose.

2 Year olds
Apply the coating to condoms.

Scratches from the other side of the disk ;)
Apply the coating to the other side of the disk? (this answer is serious :P )

Re:For cars too?

[stinkfoot]

> From what I've seen, they're already do as much as they possibly can.

...like filling most of them with material that isn't worth backing up...

Re:For cars too?

[Woody77]

Actually, what you're referring to is the side and rear windshield tempered safety-glass, which breaks into small squarish pieces with any sharp impact.

The windshield is actually layers of glass and a clear plastic, which holds the glass together as it shatters.

Safety glass breaks into cubes, but normal glass spiderwebs.

As a volunteer firefighter, and not only being trained on how to remove automotive glass expediently, but also having seen "forehead dents" in windshields (luckily no full-ejection of occupants out the windshield), I can attest to how it actually breaks.

BMW is putting Polycarbonate windows in the 740 series cars. You can't break those with a sledgehammer (I know someone who tried, our instructor on jaws of life tools).

Re:For cars too?

[Anonymous Coward]

True, no protective coating can be considered proven for the home until you play baseball with it as the ball. And the bat is a 6 foot long sword. On fire.

Re:For cars too?

[HyperCash]

"My friends call me white trash because of it."

Are you sure it doesn't have anything to do with the mulletsgalore.com website?

Re:For cars too?

[adolf]

Re: Automotive windows

The whole point of tempered automotive glass is to minimize injury to the heads of the passengers. Windshields use multiple layers of glass with a plastic film in between, to keep broken bits from flying into the vehicle's occupants. Side and rear windows are designed to break into small enough peices that lacerations are minimized, and lack stabilizing layers.

Contrast this with a plastic window. Most plastics are not very sharp when broken. The windows can be designed to bend outward easily. And they don't weigh anywhere near as much as glass, lessening the problems of momentum.

And since plastic doesn't have the inherent problem of normal glass (big, heavy, jugular-slicing chunks of razor-sharp material being flung about at incredible speeds), it doesn't need to have the same safeguards. To state otherwise is an example of FUD.

The safety problem, then, is easy to quantify:

Using your head at a velocity of 60MPH, does it hurt more to hit a 40lb glass windshield which will shatter (but maintain its mass and inertia) on impact, or to hit a 10-pound shatterproof plastic window which is flexibile enough to absorb your forward energy, and will remove itself outward from the vehicle on impact?

I don't have the solution to that problem, but I'd say that it's close.

On with the anecdotes:

Plastics (Lexan, in particular) have been used in race car windows for a Really Long Time Now. And since dead/blinded drivers can't win races, the people involved in selecting said windows have a rather vested interest in making sure that they're safe. So far, they've done just fine.

I'm guessing that if the automobile industry is keen enough on saving weight and materials that they're seriously discussing increasing voltage to reduce the weight of electrical wiring, that they'd really appreciate windows that aren't as heavy as the glass that they've been using forever.

If only Lexan didn't scratch so easily, I'm sure they'd jump all over it.

Oh, wait, I almost forgot. Lexan == polycarbonate == the stuff CDs are made of. Didn't TDK recently develop a coating to solve that problem?

Re:For cars too?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have experience with plastic aircraft windows. Canada's National Research Council has a pneumatic bird gun that can fire 8 lb. birds up to mach 1.5.

A 4 lb bird at mach .2 goes right through polycarbonate, and it does shatter. Unfortunately for the pilot, the edges of shattered polycarbonate are sharper than razor blades, certainly sharper than the edges of shattered glass. The canopy for the F-5 is about the worst design from this standpoint.

As far as I know, the problem with aircraft applications is that the set of requirements is lengthy:

- nearly shatterproof at high speed.
- impervious to cold, changes in density, including fogging.
- able to withstand repeated pressurization/depressurization
- ability to resist bird strikes.

Tall order. Most modern aircraft (both civil and military) use a poly/glass/poly sandwich, with a thin wire mesh for increased stability.

Other problem is from bulletproofing -- polycarbonate loses its strength over time. I think it's offgassing. Anyway, for this reason, bulletproof glass loses its rating after some time, and has to be replaced. I've seen a .22 cal go right through 15-year old bulletproof glass. So polycarb gets brittle when exposed to air, hence the sandwich approach used by aircraft manufacturers. Car windows would have to be done this way too.

Yes, the muzzle area for the birdgun is a mess of vaporized bird. and it smells funny.

Re:For cars too?

[jonadab]

> Umm wouldn't windhisled that don't break cause more fatalities? I'd imagine
> that doing a header through breakable glass is much more desirable than
> through jaws of life proof brick wall like polycarbonate.

Statistically, if you go out through the windshield, you're pretty much dead,
no matter what the windshield is made of. Even if the windshield were made
of air, whatever you hit outside isn't bloody likely to be significantly
softer than a brick wall. Asphalt is the most likely thing. The steel of
another vehicle is second-most-likely. If you're worried about dying of
deceleration trauma in this situation, there's a nifty safety device built
into most newer-model vehicles called a "seatbelt", which if used properly
will generally prevent you from going through the windshield. HTH.HAND.

(Yes, the glass of the windshield would slow you down a bit going through
it, but since it doesn't have a lot of give, it doesn't do so gently. If
we made windshields out of two-foot-thick foam rubber (SPF), that might
help a bit, but it would also have the negative side-effect of reducing
visibility too much. The airbag is an attempt at a compromise partial
solution to this problem -- it only reduces visibility when it activates,
and in those cases it presumbly is needed rather more than visibility, or
so goes the theory.

The point of the unbreakable windshields is presumably to prevent injuries
(or fatalities) from outside objects coming in through the windshield and
whacking the occupants. If the occupants go out through the windshield,
there isn't a great deal that can be done for them. That's a DOA scenerio.
So instead of making soft windshields, it's better to _prevent_ people from
going there in the first place -- hence seatbelts and airbags.

Coasters?

[Anonymous Coward]

But where am I going to get my coasters from then?

Re:Coasters?

[the_other_one]

AOL

Uh-oh..

[Mechcommander]

Indestructable AOL disks.. *Shivers*

Re:Uh-oh..

[Carnildo]

Indestructable AOL disks.. *Shivers*

I've heard people have good results with the application of Tesla coils to the problem.

Re:Uh-oh..

[Tablizer]

Indestructable AOL disks.. *Shivers*

No, Good! We then have free roofing "tiles" that last forever. You know how much roofing tiles cost?

Re:Uh-oh..

[pHatidic]

Mount Doom.

Re:Uh-oh..

[LordLucless]

Let me know how that turns out. Me, I'm rather suspicious of a roofing tile that comes with a hole in the middle.

Hmm....

[JoeLinux]

I *ALWAYS* wondered why people whose buildings get tagged wouldn't spray teflon on the side of their building...now I will wonder why they don't use this stuff.

Sounds pretty cool

Joe

Re:Hmm....

[danlor]

You try spinning your building at 8000 RPM for the "spin application" process.

Re:Hmm....

[shigelojoe]

You try spinning your building at 8000 RPM for the "spin application" process.


There's a "screwing in a lightbulb" joke in there somewhere...

Re:Hmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

I looked into anti-grafitti treatment for my fraternity house in Boston several years ago. Even targeting just the worst spot (~35x10ft brick wall) was excessively expensive compared to renting a sandblaster every three months and spending a Saturday morning cleaning it and paying for repegging the mortar every other year.

Granted, the level of grafitti problems we had were only only 'nuisance level', the cost of treating the wall astounded me. Even with the treatment we still would have had to rent a pressure washer to clean it and have to redo the teflon every few years. It was much cheaper to sandblast and repair the damage.

The teflon isn't really a miracle solution.

I wish I'd caught some asshole tagging the house, but it's probably best that I didn't...I got pretty angry over the thing. We did set up a camera for a while and gave the cops the video, but that had no noticable impact.

Re:Hmm....

[MyLongNickName]

What a stupid insight. I doubt I would fit in a lightbulb... much less my wife AND me.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

PSP

[Mekabyte]

The PSP could really use this.

CD Rot

[LiquidCoooled]

I wonder if they apply this coating as a complete shield, would it prevent CDs rotting?

Remember, theres two sides to every coating.

Re:CD Rot

[TheMediaWrangler]

Often, CD rot is due to poor evacuation of oxygen between the layers of the CD during manufacture. If the O2 is already present, a new coating won't help much.

Will this defeat the marker DRM exploit?

[NotQuiteReal]

No more marking the edge of CD to defeat the copy protection?

Dude, I want that coating

[geordieboy]

I would chew my own nuts off to get my hands on a Powerbook dipped in this shit

Re:Dude, I want that coating

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that says something about the Mac userbase...

Re:Dude, I want that coating

[ColaMan]

Unix? Probably not even circumcised. Savages.

I want!

[RealAlaskan]

I want this for my plastics. I mean, my glasses with the plastic lenses which aren't quite as clear as they used to be. This would make life significantly better for all us glasses wearers!

I just wonder if it's antireflective, too?

Re:I want!

[riprjak]

See my post somewhere else here :)... Polymer opthalmic lenses have carried (or have had the option to carry, depending on how cheap you are) scratch resistant coatings for a VERY LONG time... Anti reflective coatings too, tho these are not chemical "films" applied as liquids (as per scratch resisiting) but are thin layers of metal applied using PVD (Physical Vapour Deposition).

Most of the "hazing" would be due to build up of oils or fluids leaching in from the exposed edges when they are cut for framing.

Of course, scratch resistant is NOT scratch proof. Not now, not ever.

Err!
jak.

Re:I guess the real question is

[NotQuiteReal]

Fun to watch, but the smell - yuck.

I don't know which is worse - AOL raw or cooked!

Re:*Yawn*...

[geordieboy]

You have very stringent anti-scratch requirements. I salute you.

Odd...

[Ibanez]

You'd think that if we had the capabilities to make something like this, it would have been done...

A coating that is (I assume) optically perfect enough to not mess up something as sensitive as the laser in a CD, and that durable, would be a boon for a huge number of industries.

I'll have to see it before I believe it, and then, if its true, someone's probably gonna make a good bit of money...:D

Blake

Re:I guess the real question is

[nomadic]

I don't know which is worse - AOL raw or cooked!

The worst is installed.

Re:Finally...

[UWC]

I can take my CDs to the beach!

I can hear your CD player's various moving parts whimpering in fear.

What is so horrible about caddies?

[amorsen]

"The consortium is pleased because no consumer optical disc that uses a caddy has ever been a commercial success."

I don't find the caddies around 3 1/2" floppies a significant hassle. Why can we deal with caddies on magnetic media, but not on optical media?

Re:What is so horrible about caddies?

[Short Circuit]

Arguments about the usefulness and modern cost of floppies aside, they'd still be cheaper if you didn't need the caddy.

Re:What is so horrible about caddies?

[Dynedain]

That's because the caddie was a part of the media, just like Zip disks.

When the caddy sits on your desk, and you have to put the media in it in order to insert it into a drive (like early CD-ROMs and DVD-RAM) it becomes much less consumer-friendly.

Childproof?

[sugarbabe]

I want that coating on my pocket pc! Current screen was destroyed by my three year old using the original plastic stylus. I never imagined it was possible :(

Oh yeah?

[HarveyBirdman]

Can it stand up to the Samsonite gorilla???

Withstand that, and then you may color me impressed.

What about the other side?

[Sargondai]

I thought CDs these days tend to get scratched more on the 'label' side? And that's only since a price-saving move was made to remove an extra protective layer in modern CD manufacturing. Is this (or will it be) cost-efficient enough to add the protection back in?

Burning?

[Rew190]

I RTFA, but a question popped in my head. Do any of you optical gurus have any idea if this can be used with writable media?

Re:Burning?

[Stripsurge]

Well since DVDs use visible light lasers (650nm) to both write and read, and you since you can see through the plastic to the recording surface, there's no reason it shouldn't work.

What about finger prints?

[BrewerDude]

Sounds like it would make a great coating for sunglasses, too.

And, if it makes fingerprints stick less, then that'd be an added bonus. I wonder whether the ink-resisitant properties have any effect on oily or gummy buildups.

Anyone care to speculate?

Re:You are not 1337 enough

[Owndapan]

Slight correction: Give your most valuable data CD / favourite music CD / utterly irreplaceable CD and equipment to said 2-year old, and they will find a way to wreak said death and/or destruction upon the CD.

Kids are very discerning, they won't just break anything. It has to be important. Otherwise a large proportion of my collection could have been saved by keeping a stack of AOL's handy ;)

Re:Pirates Beware?

[technopinion]

No, Disney DVDs need to be ripped and re-burned so that we're not forced to sit through 10 minutes of trailers and ads (for which they've so kindly disabled ff/next chapter) every time we want to watch the movie.

Re:For those who did not RTFA...

[mrchaotica]

A caddy is a protective cover for your disc that stays on the disc even when it's in the drive. A long time ago CDs used to come in caddys (or at least, I remember seeing a CD-ROM drive that used caddys when I was little). It's a stretch, but you could call the plastic parts of a floppy disc a caddy. The main reason you'd want to avoid them is that they add bulk to the disc.

Re:Added cost?

[DAtkins]

Another way CDs can become damaged is simple oxidation of the recording layer.

But really all we are talking about is a possible manufacturing improvement in the mostly matured plastic film market. I would expect a number of these products to come out as different companies fight for market share. Until we get new polymers for the actual base material of the entire CD, this really isn't much different than that current press-on protector.

I'll just keep etching my stone tablets until then...

Also, I'd be happy if they simply replaced that super crappy plastic they use for the stupid CD cases. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to make a case that was more fragile than it's contents should be drawn and quartered.

slick bricks....

[ecalkin]

wouldn't it be kinda hard to build a building out of bricks that were coated with a non-stick substance? after all, mortar is designed to stick bricks together....

just a though!
eric

Scratch resistant is good...

[Thaelon]

But I'm wary of anything touted as -proof. -proof smacks of marketing getting their grubby paws on it.

Sure they gave you some steel wool to scratch the CD with, it's only a 3-4 on Moh's hardness scale, as in not very. I'll be impressed when it can withstand being tossed shiny side town on a little bit of sand on a hard surface and rubbed around vigrously. Quartz/glass/sand/silicon are a great deal more likely to encounter your CDs than steel wool is and they're a 7 or so on Moh's hardness scale.

I picked Moh's because to explain because: Mohs hardness is defined by how well a substance will resist scratching by another substance. from: http://www.calce.umd.edu/general/Facilities/Hardne ss_ad_.htm#3.6.1.

Re:Scratch resistant is good...

[stonecypher]

Actually, steel and quartz are both Moh 7. Glass, on the other hand, is Moh 5. You should check your numbers before hitting submit. In fact, for the very reason that steel, quartz crystal and silica have the same Moh characteristics, the steel wool is a near-ideal example medium.

Maybe more importantly, you can't bring old CDs within three feet of steel wool, or they catch fire, immediately destroying all other music within 10 feet and causing a Save Versus Nerd Jokes at dc40 to 50 feet for all non-magical non-living items in range.

Mod parent down, metamoderate modders down.

iPod?

[toolio]

how about this coating on the iPod?

It seems a harsh wind can put a scratch on the display.

I suspect this isnt a NEW development...

[riprjak]

As the opthalmic industry has applied scratch resistant coatings with matched refractive indices to polycarbonate lenses for many years now. Indeed, the "wire wool" test is a standard for scratch resistance.

It seems just a new application of old technology, long overdue IMHO. When I used to work in R&D for one of the major opthalmic lens manufacturers (when they still had R&D) I recall the licensing of our scratch proof coatings to the optical storage industry was mooted on several occasions.

As the cost of these coatings was prohibitive; often costing up to $12USD per application, I suspect they may have found ways to reduce the cost or they could afford to sacrafice matching of RI or some degrees of scratch resistance.

Furthermore, I recall an undergrad student doing work with Diamond Like Carbon coating of optical media at a local university several years back. Althought the differing refractive indices of media and coating led to problems.

Id love to see some REAL detail about this technique and hear if it is possible to apply to existing CDs/DVDs... although back at aforementioned opthalmic R&D lab I coated all of my own CDs/DVDs that I owned at the time... Since the coating was RI matched, it even repaired scratches :)

err!
jak.

degradability?

[billy reuben]

How degradable is this supertough coating? How hard will it be for you to get rid of it when you want it to go away? Remember that one of the main selling points of CFC's was that they were very unreactive. As we've all learned within the past couple decades, this was also a bad thing about them, since they were found to be associated with ozone layer depletion. I'm not saying unmarkable AOL CD's will destroy the ozone layer, but I'm thinking that disposal of items covered with this new coating might be a bit more complicated than it would be with conventional, noncoated objects. Thoughts?

WRONG! The top is FAR more vulnerable to damage.

[Behrooz]

Most CD/DVDs are FAR more vulnerable to damage by being scratched through the top side. The bottom side has most of thickness of the disc (clear, resilient plastic) between the surface and the data medium. The actual information is stored on the backside of the substrate at the TOP of the disk, and even a shallow scratch through that will destroy data.

You can have a pretty massive scratch on the plastic side, and judicious application of nose grease and a high-quality reader will do just fine. Scratch the data layer, and you're screwed.

They can still texture the top side, but *that* is the side that requires the best protection you can get on it, either way.

Re: WRONG! -- Wrong again!

[crazycrazy]

Not so for DVD's. All dvd's are "sandwiches." This is so that we can have double sided dvd's that aren't thicker than single sided ones.

A typical dvd would look like this:
Plastic coating.
Side 1 Content.
Back to back glue.
Side 2 Content, or just a blank side.
Plastic coating.
(optional) Label (if not a 2 sided DVD)

The total thickness is about the same as a CD tho, so only half as far to get through to the good stuff from either side. But as such both sides have some protection.

Re:WRONG! The top is FAR more vulnerable to damage

[reconbot]

WRONG again. DVDs have the data in between two layers of plastic. So scratch the label as much as you want, it won't damage the data as long as you don't puncture the plastic.

Fun Tip: Nuke a DVD for a minute or two and the two plastic disks will slide apart. Double the frisbees double the fun. ;-)

True story

[pedestrian crossing]

2 Year olds

When my son was 3 years old (1991), I saw a Fisher-Price CD player and thought "hey, these newfangled CDs are supposed to be indestructible, what a great idea for a Christmas present".

Christmas morning, first thing as we are oohing and aahing over the cd player, a glass of milk gets tipped into it. No problem, quickly cleaned it out and it still worked.

The kid grabs a cd and starts running across the room. He trips, falls, and breaks the cd in half.

If you want to find new failure modes, just give something to a toddler...

DVDs are "sandwiched", so they are quite safe

[phoenix321]

Compare a DVD and a CD of yours and you'll see that the DVD is made of two plastic layers with the reflective surface between them, while the CD only has one with the reflective surface at max barely protected bv a coating.

If you have an old or damaged DVD and CD, try scratching them from the label side. The CD will instantly have scratches that can be seen from both sides, but I'll bet you won't damage the reflective surface of the DVD if you scratch it with anything short of a box cutter. That's why the manufacturer logo and other preprinted text on the DVD-R label side appears a bit "fuzzy" sometimes - it is beneath 0,6mm a polycarbonate layer.

This was the only drawing I found without searching too long. It pictures a dual layer DVD, but the general construction scheme is the same.

Upper polycarbonate layer:
Outer label (optional, mostly used on movie DVDs)
Polycarbonate 0,3mm
Data U-1 and semi-reflective layer upper side (optional for dual-layer, double-side discs, only with no outer label)
Polycarbonate 0,3mm
Data U2 and full reflective layer upper side (optional for double-side discs, only with no outer label)
Inner label (optional, used on most DVD-Rs, only without label and not on double-sided discs of course)
Bonding glue
Lower polycarbonate layer:
Full reflective layer down side and data D-2
Polycarbonate 0,3mm
Semi-reflective layer down side and data D-1 (optional for dual-layer discs)
Polycarbonate 0,3mm

Thickness total ~1,2mm. All DVDs have two layers of polycarbonate with the primary reflective surface sandwiched between them (the secondary, if present, is embedded within). You can scratch the underside, diffracting the laser but you cannot peel off the reflective coating anymore like you could with CD-Rs. That gives DVDs a better durability and theoretical aging resistance, but how fast the glue between the sandwiches dissolves or affects the refletive layer is yet to be determined.

Each reflective surface has a capacity of ~4,7 GB, hence dual-layer discs have ~2x 4,7 and double-sided, dual-layer discs ~4x 4,7. (a little less due to longer pit lengths in dual layer recording) The rare "double-sided DVDs" actually have two sides of data like an old vinyl recording.