Blu-ray substrate - is it improving? Noryl?

[glen]

Ever since the advent of the disc, there has been disc scratching and repair.
The plastic the discs are made of seems to be the same, but I bet they have made it stronger and more scratch resistant over the years. However, I have not heard much about it. It also seems to me that as the data gets smaller and more compressed, the disc would gain sensitivity to scratches. Gorilla glass has been a godsend for cell phones. I am wondering if there is a newer more scratch resistant coating or plastic about to debut in the optical disc arena.

 

[serpretetsky]

I don't know if there is newer stuff coming out, but you seem to be right about newer discs in general requiring a scratch resistant surface. Here's wikipedia's entry on blu ray.

"Hard-coating technology
Since the Blu-ray Disc data layer is closer to the surface of the disc compared to the DVD standard, it was at first more vulnerable to scratches.[75] The first discs were housed in cartridges for protection, resembling Professional Discs introduced by Sony in 2003.
Using a cartridge would increase the price of an already expensive medium, so hard-coating of the pickup surface was chosen instead. TDK was the first company to develop a working scratch-protection coating for Blu-ray Discs. It was named Durabis. In addition, both Sony and Panasonic's replication methods include proprietary hard-coat technologies. Sony's rewritable media are spin-coated, using a scratch-resistant and antistatic coating. Verbatim's recordable and rewritable Blu-ray Discs use their own proprietary technology, called Hard Coat.[76]
The Blu-ray Disc specification requires the testing of resistance to scratches by mechanical abrasion.[72] In contrast, DVD media are not required to be scratch-resistant, but since development of the technology, some companies, such as Verbatim, implemented hard-coating for more expensive lineups of recordable DVDs."
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc