But how fantastic to collect not only a set of photographic prints, but a shiny, Gold coloured CD with all my pictures on in digital format.  Now I could load any of my photographs into Paintshop Pro, remove any unwanted artefacts, crop it, zoom it, change the brightness and contrast, and generally process it into a form that I wanted.  Best of all, I could save the image as a Windows Bitmap and then load it in as my Windows wallpaper.  You might not hink twice about doing that today, but at the time, it was cutting-edge.

I recently came across my old PhotoCDs and I thought it would be interesting to go through those old pictures again.  Most were from a holiday in Australia, and some from time spent in India.

So I loaded a PhotoCD into my DVD-RW drive on my PC and found that it couldn’t read the disc.  I tried another disc and it struggled to read that one, but managed it in the end.  The third disc was ok though.

I tried the first disc again and this time it managed to read it and I was able to open some of the pictures.

The discs were all clean and had been stored in a cool, dry place.  None of them had warped or become damaged in any other way.

It is my guess that the technology of my DVD-RW is quite different from the CD writer used to create the gold PhotoCD.  DVDs use a higher track density, so the laser beam used to read them is narrower.  To achieve this, they use laser light of a different frequency (colour) than used in earlier CD drives.  It is also possible that the alignment of the tracks on the PhotoCD are not as precise as on a modern disc because the beam width was much wider, meaning a lower tolerance was required.  Finally, the gold surface of the disc will have different characteristics to the modern silver surface.

All these factors put together could mean that the old gold PhotoCDs are not compatible with modern CD or DVD drives.

If you have any of the old gold coloured PhotoCDs, I’d dig them out and see if your computer can still read them.  If not, find somebody with an older computer that can read them, and get the files copied onto a new CD or DVD.

In fact it’s worth making a copy even if your PC can read them.  It’s always better to have a backup.  And as technology changes and improves, you might find that some time in the future, you won’t be able to read them, and your pictures will effectively be lost.