The Optical Pickup

An optical pickup is a part of an optical disc drive responsible for reading and/or writing data out of optical media discs such as compact discs (CD), digital versatile discs (DVD), etc. The heart of the optical pickup is its laser diode. This emits laser beams that serve as the reader/writer of the optical pickup. Depending on the power emitted by the laser diode can the optical disc drive function. More commonly, the higher amplitude power is used for writing data because more power is necessary to burn the surface of the disc than for reading data out of it.