optical disc

or optical disk

A plastic-coated disk on which data, such as text, music, or video, is digitally stored as microscopic regions of varying reflectivity and is read by scanning the surface with a laser. Also called laser disc.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

optical disc

(Computer Science) computing an inflexible disc on which information is stored in digital form by laser technology. Also called: video disc

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

op′tical disc′

1. Also called laser disc. a grooveless disk on which digital data, as text, music, or pictures, are stored as tiny pits in the surface and read or replayed by a laser beam scanning the surface.

2. videodisc.

Compare compact disc.

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

optical disc - a disk coated with plastic that can store digital data as tiny pits etched in the surface; is read with a laser that scans the surface

optical disk

compact disc, compact disk, CD - a digitally encoded recording on an optical disk that is smaller than a phonograph record; played back by a laser

memory device, storage device - a device that preserves information for retrieval

DVD, videodisc, videodisk - a digital recording (as of a movie) on an optical disk that can be played on a computer or a television set

Translations

disco ottico

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

The 2004 IIPA recommendation to the USTR praised Taiwan's improvement in combating optical disc piracy: Taiwan has ...

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Invention: Optical disc reader, the key to DVD players.

Inventor vengeance: Japan's top inventors go to court

These technologies have come a long way over the last two decades, as we've gone from 5.25-inch optical disc drives with $10,000 price tags, to CD/DVD burners that are either bundled with base model PCs or retail for under $250.

The future of CD-RW and DVD in corporate IT. (Storage Networking)

With Primera's Composer Optical Disc Duplicator, you can create up to 50 CD-Rs per job at speeds of up to 16x.

Burn, baby, burn

Basically, the MediaShield would set up an independent legal entity to monitor the flow of polymers used in next-generation optical disc manufacturing.

Dow Pulls the Plug on DVD Pirates

There are three basic categories of optical disc drives--CD-ROM, Write Once Read Many (WORM) and Erasable/Rewritable.

Optical disk drives: technologies offer choices for storage

NISO expects the standard to succeed largely because it represents the consensus of the High Sierra Group, a committee of optical disc makers that met last year to design a CD-ROM industry standard.

Illuminating standard for read only optical discs