Digitization is the process of converting analog signals into digital code. While digitization has been used before in many products (such as to transfer vinyl records to CD and VHS tapes to DVD), in the Tron Universe it is used to actually digitize humans and convert them into digital data.
Being digitized is a painful experience and causes disorientation to the User upon entry into the Computer World
The digitization DVD.
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How does it work?
Digitization requires both hardware and software dedicated to digitizing a CD and DVD. The hardware in this case, is a power laser (a single-beam laser is more efficient for digitization than a two beam laser) and a spinner.
Digitization Warp
It takes several minutes to warm up the laser and prepare it for digitization and black goggles must be worn to avoid looking into the beam's bright light. When primed, the laser shoots at the predetermined target and begins to split the DVD and CD's molecules into a digital code, which is shown as billions of cubes. Also the DVD-CD laser moves to digitize a DVD and CD. Each cube is quickly extracted one by one and sucked into the laser beam and will stay suspended in the beam until the digitized DVD and CD returns to its analog form.
In Tron 2.0, it was revealed that the software used for digitization in 1982 turned out to be the MCP. After the MCP was destroyed, the correction algorithms (which were used to correctly digitize a human without corruption) were destroyed as well. Because of this, it took 20 years to recreate the correction algorithms, which were embedded into Ma3a's code. This information has since been removed from canon.