Burning vs. Pressing

Our customers expect quality from us which is consistently high and durable for CDs and DVDs. For this reason, we work with expensive, top quality injection moulding equipment.

You won't find blank CDs among our stock, because we do not 'burn' discs. Instead, we press your data in liquid polycarbonate at a temperature of 200°C (plastic made, for example by Bayer, which is delivered to us in the form of granules). We then seal in the information with a coating of industrial lacquer which protects your data effectively from any external hazards.

In this way, your CD/DVD can last up to 30 years. A pressed disc is considerably more resilient against dirt and scratches than a burned CD or DVD, as the data is not saved on the surface as is the case with a burned disc, but instead is contained inside the CD.

Furthermore, a burner for a domestic PC only costs around £20, whereas for an injection moulding machine, one pays up to £500K. Injection moulding machines of the type used by OK Media are far more powerful and reliable and each one can produce up to 20,000 discs in a 24 hour period.

What exactly happens during the burning process?

With a burned CD-R the information is written onto the surface of the disc simply by exposing a photo-sensitive layer (dyes), whereas with pressing the information is physically and securely embedded in the CD.

The data on a CD-R which has been burned can be damaged by strong light. The quality of a CD-R is also heavily dependent on both the blank CD and the CD burner. The quality of blank discs varies even within batches from the same manufacturer.

There are too many uncertainties in all this for our standards of working, so pressing is always our first choice. And for orders of over 500, it is not economically viable to do them with burners.

Each pressed CD or DVD from us contains a barcode which is read at every stage of the production process.

 

This principle of quality assurance does not apply only to the pressing stage. The CD is checked in terms of content right through the production process. This is not the case with a burned CD, where mistakes are therefore more likely to happen.