During optical media’s heyday, storage formats like the Compact Disc (CD) and the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) were notorious for scratching, scuffing, and collecting fingerprints at an alarming rate. This was a serious problem, leading to playback skips, stutters, and even data corruption at large.
What you may not know is that modern optical media formats — particularly discs of the Blu-ray and 4K UHD Blu-ray variety — are far more robust than their CD and DVD predecessors ever were. In fact, a modern Blu-ray is fairly unlikely to scratch under normal circumstances, and even fingerprints are largely a thing of the past.
Flip an average Blu-ray disc and an average CD/ DVD onto its respective readable data side, and you’ll notice that the former has a physically different look and feel when compared to the latter. There’s a reason for this, and it’s called Durabis (which is Latin for “you will last”).
What makes modern Blu-ray discs so scratch resistant?
It’s all thanks to an innovative protective hard coat layer
Durabis is the brand name for a clear polymer-based coating developed by Japan’s TDK Corporation. First unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2005, Durabis was designed primarily to remove the need for a protective cartridge on the soon-to-be-mainstream Blu-ray media format.
You see, the data layer of a Blu-ray disc is closer to the surface of the disc itself when compared to other optical formats like CDs and DVDs, which meant protective cartridges or cassettes would’ve been necessary had a protective coating solution not been developed.
TDK’s Durabis coating material was innovative for its time not only because of its scratch-resistant properties, but also because it managed to be less than 0.004-inches (0.1mm) thick and to be transparent enough to be read by Blu-ray players. Further refinements to the technology have since been made, including the aptly named Durabis 2 in 2007.
The end result is physically robust disc coatings across the board.
The Blu-ray format mandates a scratch-resistant coating, but other manufacturers like Sony have since developed their own proprietary hard coating technologies in lieu of Durabis. The end result is physically robust disc coatings across the board, and at an industry-wide scale.
TDK’s hard coat layer, as well as alternative solutions from Sony and others, have gone a long way in making Blu-ray and its newer 4K UHD Blu-ray counterpart the best in-market optical media standard that exists. While it’s technically possible to apply such coatings to older CDs and DVDs, the lack of specification mandates mean that most older discs remain far more scratch and fingerprint-prone on the whole.
