03-12-2009, 11:57 PM
AAA wrote:
I don't see it that way at all. It's merely a protector. Like the original CD caddies that Macs had. The floppies/minifloppies, and MiniDiscs have.
Protecting the media just makes sense to me. And I'm not in any way addressing your accusations and disdain for the other part of the conversation you seem hell bent on forwarding.
Hey! I may be bent, but I'm not hell bent. I am questioning the wisdom of manufacturing discs with a special protective caddy, it's a fair question.
Example: "Someone should make a permanent protective attachment on these record albums to protect them" would have sounded peculiar to album collectors a decade or two ago. Vinyl albums are even more vulnerable to damage than modern CDs are. But they were an entertainment medium, not a vital storage medium. No accusations, or agendas to forward, I'm just pointing out some of the reasons the "permanent protection" attachment idea is unlikely to catch on.
When CDs had special caddies, they were "computer discs", for storing important computer data. No music discs had them. Computer CDs weren't primarily an entertainment medium. As a storage medium, they were new, and held what was considered at that time to be a large amount of data. And computer compact disc storage was comparatively expensive. It was very temporary. It's worth noting, the scheme was quickly discarded. The costs went down and CDs became ubiquitous and disposable, not a precious computer-based medium that needed special protection. Consumers likely found caddies to be unnecessary and inconvenient.
Now even DVDs are becoming cheap and disposable, compared to what they were like when first introduced. Blu-ray discs (if the medium ever gains acceptance in the first place) will also become cheap and eventually disposable, as even larger-storage discs emerge. Overall, consumers (with the possible exception of a fraction of concerned parents with rowdy kids) don't want the inconvenience of protective caddies on their movie discs, and understandably, manufacturers and movie studios don't want to make them. Even if the idea did have popular currency, the medium is too temporary and uncertain to even bother.
Adding a special cartridge to Hi Def movie discs, to satisfy a small niche of consumers, would work, however, if there's a manufacturer willing to address that small niche. Kids movies, or video games, for example. As we see with console discs. As long as it doesn't punish the rest of us, who prefer our discs naked, and are willing to take responsibility for protecting them in their jewelbox cases.
From Wikipedia:
Some early CD-ROM drives used a mechanism where CDs had to be inserted into special cartridges or caddies, somewhat similar in appearance to a jewel case. Although the idea behind this—a tougher plastic shell to protect the disc from damage—was sound, it did not gain wide acceptance among disc manufacturers. Drives that used the caddy format required "bare" discs to be placed into a caddy before use, making them less convenient to use. Drives that worked this way were referred to as caddy drives or caddy load(ing), but from about 1994 most computer manufacturers moved to tray-loading[1], or slot-loading drives.The same system is still available for more recent formats such as DVD-RAMs[citation needed] but is not common. The PlayStation Portable, UMD disk is a similar concept, using a small proprietary DVD-type disk, in a fixed unopenable caddie as both a copy protection and damage prevention measure.