Primarily, this is due to consumer demand. Rather than burning a CD full of their favorite songs, people are using streaming services like Pandora or Spotify. Even backups have moved to the cloud where, instead of burning your data to multiple DVDs, you can now archive it to one of many services at the click of a button.
Optical disc sales are still booming in some markets, though. There is a large demand for recordable CD and DVD media in healthcare, education, government, business environments and religious organizations. These areas rely heavily on optical discs for large volume duplication, data storage, and to store and transfer data generated by medical imaging devices.
Another area where demand for recordable media is still high is the music industry. Many studios still use recordable CDs because they consider the format to be “lossless.” Unlike MP3’s or streaming audio services, the music is uncompressed and sounds as crisp and clear as when you recorded it.
As you can imagine, recording studios have high standards when it comes to the media they use. For many years, the choice of professionals was CD-R media manufactured in Japan by Taiyo Yuden. In particular, the brand of choice was That’s which was sold through Taiyo Yuden’s own subsidiary, START Lab Inc. Unfortunately, Taiyo Yuden pulled out of the optical storage market in 2015 and, while you can still buy discs with TY codes, the quality, consistency and reliability is not what it once was.
At the end 2018, the CEO of Start Lab Co., Ltd., Mr. Yutaka Akihaku, met with officials at Ritek. Despite being one time rivals, Ritek was looking to develop a spiritual successor to Taiyo Yuden’s That’s brand of CD-R media and was hoping to get Mr. Akihaku’s input. Mr. Akihaku soon joined the team as a consultant and brought in one of his old customers, Mr. Yukihiro Shirakawa of D & A Music Co., Ltd., as an advisor.
With Mr. Akihaku and Mr. Shirakawa now on the team, Ritek got to work in the spring of 2019. Using their RITEK Pro CD-R media as a base, the company experimented with various dyes and adjusted different production parameters. It took more than 60 samples, but the team was able to achieve the sound quality they wanted.
Once they were able to get the sound quality squared away, Ritek set out to improve the printable surface of the disc. The company wanted to minimize the contact area between discs when stacked and eliminate the “white ring” you often see when printing solid colors. Ritek spent a couple of months on this problem alone and was able to solve it by changing the injection molding process. They reshaped the stamper, which eliminated the “white ring” while making the disc more stable and accurate.
With this new patented injection molded process, called “Circle Guard” (“CG” for short), Ritek believes that its inkjet printable discs are superior to any others on the market. To back up these claims, the company recently posted a number of videos on YouTube. The first video shows how stacking discs creates the “white ring” on traditional media. With Ritek’s new discs, there is no ring so you can print from the hub to the edge without any difference in color.
In addition to removing the “white ring”, Ritek’s new manufacturing process has made the “CG” discs “stickless.” When used in a robotic autoloading duplicator, you can rest assured knowing that it’s grabbing only one disc at a time and not two or more that are stuck together.
In the last video, Ritek demonstrates how much stronger their “CG” discs are, thanks to this new injection molding process. To show this, the company slowly applies pressure to a disc from another manufacturer and it cracks at about 13kgf (kilogram-force). With Ritek’s new “CG” discs they are able to apply more than 45kgf without it breaking. That’s more than 3x the strength of the competition!
Ritek Pro CD-R and DVD-R media with “CG” technology is in production now and has begun to make its way to customers in the music industry via business to business markets. The company plans to make the discs generally available later this year with a possible consumer market release by the holiday season. Personally, I’m looking forward to this as the results with Ritek Pro media have been quite good, even without the addition of “CG” technology.
