The total data on a CD-ROM including the error correcting redundancy exceeds 800 MB, or 6.4 Gb.
If you could imagine getting 1 bit from the optical disc per pixel (which is way too optimistic physically), you would need a 6 gigapixel camera focused super-precisely at the disc surface.
Looking at the problem from a different angle, Wikipedia says the features that store the data on the disc surface are about 800 nm (or about a micrometer) long. So to photograph them, you'd want to have pixels ideally smaller than a micrometer on each side. It's easy to check that an ordinary camera isn't achieving that kind of resolution without adding on external magnifying equipment.
The optics of a CD-ROM drive are optimized for something pretty different than the optics of a camera. But if you made enough tweaks and adaptations, sure, the data is ultimately there and can be captured by a different kind of sensor than the one it was designed for. It would be a cool project.
I'm mostly just pointing out that adapting your camera to successfully capture billions of sub-micrometer features isn't that trivial.
Ignoring the lens resolution you'd need for a near 1 to 1 rendering at that size, any hand movement or misalignment would also be catastrophic.
That sounds like a crazy dream until we get to sensor in the peta pixel range ?
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/CD-DVD-Blu-ray-disc-data...
dvh•1h ago
voidUpdate•1h ago