The new dyes cast: mapping the CD-R media market

Emedia Professional, Oct, 1998 by Robert A. Starrett

With CD-R media selling worldwide for a buyer's-market buck apiece, who'd want to play in this market on the vendor side? Everybody, it seems. Ten years ago, a coaster was a disaster, not only because media cost $50 wholesale and sold for $100 retail, but because it likely meant you lost several hours of prep work by a high-priced engineer on your fastest machine and an expensive CD recorder. At sub-$2 pricing in singles and sub-$1 pricing in quantity, a coaster today is a mere annoyance. And chances are that you didn't need an engineer to run the recorder or prep the data--more likely you did it yourself and expended little effort in the process.

Is today's apparent media glut the consumer's paradise it seems, or is a new disc shortage--like the bone-dry summer of 1996--looming on the horizon? Is capacity up or down? Where is demand? And how are media manufacturers faring in the new market and differentiating their products?

Whether boom or bust is in the cards for the CD-R media manufacturing business, for now, the production capacity of media maker's plants across the globe continues to grow. Many large Asian firms have joined the media market; relative newcomers Princo, CIS, CMC, Ritek, and MJC are all producing media in quantity. One established Canadian replicator, Americ Disc, has also recently entered the recordable CD manufacturing game.

And many companies who don't actually make it seem to be lining up to sell it. Taiyo Yuden continues to fill massive disc production orders for resale by Sony, JVC, Philips, DIC, DOT, Imation, and BASF. TDK recently announced an expansion in its monthly CD-R production capacity to 8.5 million discs, up 70 percent over last year.

And this is not your father's media. TDK, Taiyo Yuden, Mitsui, and Ricoh have all joined Verbatim in shunning gold as a reflective layer and moving to silver. True, you may not know it by looking at some of the new media like Taiyo Yuden's "That's CD-R," whose top surface of the disc is painted gold, covering the silver layer underneath.

Others take advantage of the change by showing the silver off and highlighting it in marketing materials. Ricoh, for instance, calls their new silver media "Platinum" and touts it is as offering "the lowest Block Error Rate (BLER) in the industry." While others may disagree on that tagline, each manufacturer is still searching for ways to distinguish its media from all the others in the market. When you are selling product for a buck, margins are small and profits come from volume. And volume must come from advertising and consumer education. Adding to the media market's mounting volatility is the need to be able to record reliably at the faster 6X and 8X speeds promised in recorders from Yamaha, Sanyo, and others.

THE WHY OF DYE: CD-R MEDIA AND HOW IT GOT THAT WAY

Some of the earliest CD-R media, developed to work in Yamaha's first-to-market CD recording system, was manufactured by Fuji Film and used a silver reflective layer and a metallic layer based on Fuji film technology, rather than the organic dye used in most subsequent CD-R discs. The pregroove was not wobbled; timing was performed by reading hash marks on the outside rim of the disc.

Soon TDK and Taiyo Yuden got into the act, producing organic dye-based media with a gold reflective layer--an approach still employed in today's media, albeit with improved dye formulations. The early, immature media caused some interesting problems. A certain popular Technics CD player, often used in radio stations, had a bad habit of accepting the early media, but refusing to eject it, causing much consternation to disc jockeys who were left without a player and possibly without a show.

Today's CD-R media--typically much more reliable than its predecessors--gets its usability and longevity from a variety of factors, including how the discs are made and the materials used. Several recording characteristics correspond directly with a dye and reflectivity coating combination, and longevity issues derive from each combination.

One of four dye types in use today, cyanine, often called "green" dye, was the original CD-R dye referenced in the Orange Book, and has been around for about ten years. TDK was a pioneer in cyanine disc-making. Phthalocyanine dye, generally referred to as "gold" and with us nearly as long as cyanine, was originally used by Mitsui and licensed to Kodak for their discs. Metal Azo dye has been used for about three years in discs manufactured by Mitsubishi/Verbatim. The Mitsubishi/Verbatim discs were the first media since the frontier days of the early Fuji discs to use a silver reflective coating. Phthalocyanine dye appears to be less sensitive to exposure to light after recording, and this may result in greater media longevity.

In addition to different dyes, media manufacturers can vary the dye thickness, reflective surface thickness and material, as well as groove structure to fine-tune the recording characteristics of a particular disc for a wide range of recording speeds and powers. Choices manufacturers make in determining these physical characteristics also have a direct impact on the longevity of the media (the integrity of its stored data over time).