this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Imagine if someone managed to make software for your phone that could use the camera to read a compact disc. That would be rad as fuck.
I remember readin an article about some software that would allow you to scan vinyl records in a normal scanner, process the image and get a representation of the music on the record.
Probably easier there. Records are just a bunch of physical grooves which are "read" by a physical needle scraping over them. CDs are read using a laser and at way higher speeds. But a camera uses light to work, too, so 🤷♂️
I'd highly doubt any phone camera would have sufficient resolution to resolve the pits on a CD, let alone a DVD or Blu-Ray.
Just buy a lens for hundreds of euros. That's much cooler than a cheap USB drive.
Trust me, I have several. I'll try my RF 100mm 2.8 Macro on it later if you want, but I'm positive even that can't see the data on an optical disk.
This would make for a KILLER Hackaday read if you got a proof of concept working though hahaha.
Tech Tangents already tried it, more or less. He did a whole video on it, but here's the wiki entry. TL;DR: You really do need an actual microscope at minimum. You're certainly not doing an entire disk in one shot. If you want to even attempt to reconstruct the entire thing you're going to have to figure out how to solve the tracking challenges, and at that rate you may as well just use a drive.