How do CDs/DVDs/game disks work?
In: Technology
The shiny layers on the disks have tiny groves cut into them in circles around the center. These groves are only a few hundred nanometers wide which is just wide enough for a laser beam. So the disk reader have a laser shining at this grove and a detector that detects the reflection of the laser. This means that it can detect where the grove is cut and where the reflective surface is left intact as the disk spins around. This forms a pattern of ones and zeroes that gets converted into data for the rest of the machine to read.
Latest Answers