Star-Shaped Discs
October 1st, 2009 by 
Multimedia Mike
I purchased a Sony PlayStation 3 recently. I thoroughly read the accompanying manual on a train ride and a particular detail caught this optical media aficionado’s eye:
Wait… what? Star-shaped discs? Heart-shaped ones as well? Are those real? How would those even work? I know about 80 cm discs that fit in the smaller groove of a CD tray. I also know about the business card-shaped CD’s; I even have a few games that were published on such a form factor (for example). But a star has points. And a heart? How?
A brief bit of Googling for “star shaped disc” leads me directly to the Wikipedia article on shaped CDs, which happens to showcase a heart-shaped CD. But how would a star-shaped disc work? That (typically) has 5 points. Where would the circular track go, the one that holds data? I figure there could be sort of a fat star, a circle with 5 points. This turns out to be the correct idea as this disc manufacturing page indicates.
Check out the page and see the oddest shape– the house CD.
Posted in General | 
3 Comments »
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Thankfully those star shape discs were not used in Dark Angel (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099817).
October 25th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
The Chemical Brothers “Star Guitar” was released on a star shaped CD (which I own), http://www.discogs.com/image/R-234428-1166034910.jpeg
Also, I assume you were referring to 8cm (80mm) CDs. Could you imagine trying to carry around a CD walkman/discman designed to play 80cm discs? :-) (well, it’s hard to imagine even carrying around a CD walkman/discman at all these days)
October 26th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Some years ago I had an audio CD with 6-7 Christmas songs, shaped and printed like Santa on his sledge :) :)
(Not very) strangely, it actually didn’t work very well in some drives ….