It was brand giants, Philips and Sony, who co-developed the first compact disc in 1982. Creating a polycarbonate plastic disc with a diameter of 120mm and weighing about 16grams.
The revolutionary media is made reflective with a thin layer of aluminium added to the surface, then finished off with a film of lacquer for added protection.
Printing onto a compact disc allows a unique label to be added and your product, with the most popular CD printing method being screen printing.
The CD was originally created to store sound recordings only, however, it was developed later to allow storage of data (CD-ROM). A standard compact disc can store around 80 minutes of audio or 700MB of data, making this an ideal storage solution for many industries world wide.
At the time of introduction of the compact disc, computer hard drives were only capable of typically holding around 10MB of data, so a huge leap in data storage for the industry.
It’s no surprise that the CD quickly took off and over the next 20 years, 200 billion compact disc’s were sold worldwide.
Even in todays technology, the CD is still a very popular storage solution, allowing mass production with CD duplication.