Slashdot Mirror
CD-R Prices Could Triple This Summer
Suppafly writes: "According to this story at pcworld.com cd-r media prices are going to skyrocket once the surplus of CD-R media is used up and companies return to having a shortage. 'Consumers ... can expect discs to sell for about 35 to 40 cents at retail.' This doesn't sound good for those of us who backup damn near everything to CD-R." Some spares couldn't hurt, either way.
OK, so there's a lot of surplus, and they aren't making a whole lot from it all. Solution? Report it's all running out, and prices will "skyrocket" (35 cents a cdr isn't that high, c'mon, last time I bought them anything under a buck was great). So people go out and buy a lot, thus creating their shortage. Nice work.
Then again, this could be even worse for them, people buy a whole lot, and then don't need any more for a couple years, and then they drop to nothing because there's no demand... ;-)
OK OK enough conspiracy theories... ;-)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
"So, I guess the moral is, if you see any "free after rebate" deals, take advantage of them because they won't be around long. Race you to Best Buy!"
Me: "I'd like to buy this spindle of CD-Rs, please."
Best Buy Cashier: "OK. I see that these have an instant rebate, so the price is only $2 today."
Me: "Cool."
Cashier: "However, with our convenient CD-R protection plan, for the low cost of only $35, we'll provide you with a replacement if your purchase should be found defective for any reason."
Me: "uhm...wait a second..." Cashier: "We also highly recommend these special CD-R cleaning cloths, available for only $19.95...you can't clean CD-R's any other way, you know..." Me: "wha? cleaning cloths? I don't think..." Cashier: "...and don't forget these special CD-R labelling pens, only $7.50, which are guaranteed to work with your new CD-Rs." Me:"Hold on just one second now..." Cashier: "better not to argue, sir. See the cameras? They're watching...ok then, your total comes to $70 after tax...sir? sir?"
Sound of car tires peeling in parking lot...
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Anyone who has only been there in the last five years has never seen a bus from the former system . . .
Well, for one thing, I'm an artist and lossless high-DPI scan files take up a LOT of room...
</shameless_plug>...
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I just finished burning all 200 episodes of Sailor Moon onto 11 CDs...got them off my hard drive, at long last. I only have a few gigs, I need that space! :) I've also burned a couple fansubbed episodes of the new Transformers series, Car Robots to CD, so I can take and show them to people.
I've also archived about 450 megs in textual logs generated by a private roleplaying chatserv I frequent (and felt guilty about "wasting" 200 megs of space, if you can believe it :). I also have plans to master some personal mix CDs, maybe do a few copies of them for friends. I'll also make some personal MP3 CD-ROMs for playing at the school computer lab, since they capped my cable connection to a point where I can no longer stream them from home.
I'm not sure what else I'll do with them. Download more video eps and burn them, perhaps archive all my Webscription and other e-books . . . maybe I'll even back up my hard drive.
It's kind of sad, in a way. Now that hard drives with dozens of gigs are affordable, 650 megs doesn't seem quite so big anymore.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Dude, you forgot pr0n. ;-)
I usually buy Sony's @ 12.99CAD for a 10 pack, or spindle's of 50 for $25.. at best they're $0.50 each.. how do prices triple and still stay under $0.50USD?
CD-Rs are way too cheap as it is, as a matter of fact I pretty much refuse to buy them unless they're free after rebate. Chances are that you won't have to wait but a week or two to find some sort of deal like that.
And I find myself using CD-RW disks much more anymore, even though CD-Rs are practically free I still have a problem throwing them away after burning something for just one use. CD-RWs are perfectly suited for backing stuff up week after week.
So, I guess the moral is, if you see any "free after rebate" deals, take advantage of them because they won't be around long. Race you to Best Buy!
Between CD-R's at $0.30 each, and gas at three bucks a gallon, it looks like a gloomy summer ahead for Joe American Consumer and Pr0n Hound.
Too expensive to drive to the beach and too expensive to back up all that pr0n. And with cable rates going up... we might have to start talking to each other or something.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
This is, after all, from the same people who successfully predicted the now skyrocketing price of RAM!!! ;)
For reference: In Western Europe we pay:
~$0.75 for a CD-R (DFL 1.75 in NL)
~$4.25 for a gallon of gas (DFL 2.70/liter in NL)
I would die for your American prices...
<grub> Reading
Copies and copies of demo CDs for my band. Cheap, DIY CD replication is a godsend for small indie musicians with no money. Instead of spending $100-$500 for a few hundred demo discs, we can pull it off for about $100. Plus, we can make exactly as many as we need; no extras piling up, no shortages, and we can change the content any time we want.
The convenience + low $$$ lets us give them away to fans who can't afford a dollar to cover our costs.
CDRs RULE!
Plugging your band on Slashdot RULES!
If you're not wasted, the day is.
If you're not wasted, the day is.
Cool, now maybe AOL will stop sending me trial cds. They used to send nice, reusable floppies. Gee, if this trend continues, they might have to start sending trial zip disks.
This is great, now all the STORES get slashdotted.
Almost as good as telling everyone that we're going to run out of gas in about three weeks, "GO GET SOME BEFORE ITS GONE KIDS!".
Klowner
watch me get modded down..
I'm not a bit surprised to read about this surplus of CD-Rs - I wondered how they became so cheap between 1999-2000. This tripled price of CD-Rs probably won't affect quantity demanded much.
As a side note, too many people who've never learned economics confuse demand with quantity demanded Demand of these CD-Rs will remain the same if the only factor that changes is the price - the demand curve simply determines how many CD-Rs will be purchased at a given price. My personal opinion is that the demand curve is rather flat (on a quantity vs price graph) around the current price range.
Prices may double, triple, whatever, but I still find a 50 CD-R spindle at $15-25 a bargain. Besides, shouldn't we be saving plastic and backing up on CD-RW anyway? According to the article, CD-RW prices will remain stable - perhaps CD-RWs will become even more common in a year.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
You've got to love it when a one-line comment about pr0n is modded up as insightful!
So you're a karma whore, eh? For the right price, I'll be a karma pimp...
SIG: HUP
In related news, the price of Clay Pigeons is expected to return to normal. Charlton Heston of the Shotgun Association of America stated at a press conference, "Our recent sources of cheap plastic clay pigeons are expected to dry up. We will be returning to clay clay pigeons."
Keeping
Honestly, 40 cents for a blank CDR is still a good deal. It would only make a difference to the people who buy hordes of CDRs. And to these people, I have a question:
:) What do you guys use your CDR's for? Or did I nail it on the head? The last time I burned a CD was SuSE 7.1 last month. Before that? Probably Slackware sometime in 1942.
What on earth do you use all these CDRs for? Seriously, how can you amass so much data so quickly that you need spindles atop spindles of them? =)
I have some theories:
1) Packrat. This person loves collecting everything. TV episodes, movies, software. Obviously this person doesn't actually do anything with these CDRs other than lend them out to people who make copies and do the same thing.
2) Rampant Windows pirate. This person makes illegal copies of Windows software and carries all the CDs around in a black CD-binder/case thing. Need some outdated version of Photoshop? He's your man.
3) Music Leech. All of this person's blanks go to hold the massive amounts of Napster downloads. Obviously this person does not have a long enough lifespan to listen to all of the audio acquired.
Ok enough jokes
CD-R blanks are made with cyanine dyes, not cyanide, as I said earlier. The materials are cheap. The article implies that there are plenty of CD-making machines. The article says that the royalties have dropped. There is therefore no reason to predict that CD-R prices will rise.
If you want to find out what kind of dyes your CD-R blanks use, there is a program that supplies this information, and manufacturer and capacity. The program is free. To get it:
1) Go to http://www.cdpage.com/
2) Click on Software Archives
3) Click on CD-R Identifier. The program will download.
Unzip the archive and run the program. Click on the UPPER icon to display information about your CD-R. The CD-R does not need to be blank.
Bush's education improvements were
I was really annoyed when AOL started sending me CDs rather than floppies because I can't use the CDs for anything but coasters, and now I have plenty of coasters.
Why can't they start sending me CD-RWs, at least I could use those. Especially now, since I'll actually have to pay for them. AOL-Time/Warner should consider it a PR expense. Most of the people who gripe about AOL would stop complaining if AOL was supplying them with CD-RWs.
And now in these harsh economic times when the price of CR-Rs is going through the roof... (I'll have to check my couch for lost change).
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
If Godzilla did not exist, man would have had to create him.
Here in Finland, and elsewhere in EU gas costs 1.2$ /liter.
I guess if gas was more expensive in US it would be easier for you people to sign the Kyoto agreement:)
Time to go pick up a whole bunch before the hoarders get to them. Oh, wait...
Wait a minute... I found some spare change in my couch. Forget what I just said.
And even if you do intend to use removable HDDs as your archiving system, they're still a bit more fragile than optical disks. If you drop a CD off of a two story building, unless you're dropping it onto shear granite in Point Barrow, Alaska in the middle of February, odds are it will still work. CDs aren't anywhere near as sensitive to static discharge or EM, either. And even if the info on the platters are still OK, you could still fry a chip on the controller.
Continuing along that thread, hard drives by defintion have more points of failure. It is both the medium and the mechanism to read it; CD and CD-ROM drive in one. Not only do you have to worry about how volatile the information is on the platters, but the fact that every time you power it up, it spins itself closer to mechanical failure. If it moves, it WILL break. The more it moves, the sooner it will break. So sayeth the second law of thermodynamics. If your CD-ROM drive dies, you can get a new one, borrow a friend's, scavenge an old one, et cetera. Your CDs will be fine. If your HDD dies, you're stuck with paying out the ass to a manufacturer or a specialist to get your data out of the drive.
Yes, CD-Rs write a heck of a lot slower than an HDD, but it's not meant to be anywhere near as dynamic as an HDD. The concept is to know what you want to hang on to beforehand, and then put it on the CD where you'll have it for a decade or two. You may change hard drives, you may change computers, but you'll still have the information.
And last but not least, when was the last time you tried moving a hard disk from one computer to another?
At any rate, I think CD-Rs are probably the best option for archiving/backing-up data among all the options available. Everything else you might use (be it magnetic tape, proprieatary magnetic media, or DVD-RAM) require a proprietary drive to read and write. Odds are, you'll be out of luck hardware-wise if you want to read it from another computer. A CD-R, on the other hand, can be read by just about any computer manufactured in the past decade or so. It might as well be a floppy disk it's so universal.
UPI WarezWire
With the price of CDR media getting close to $0.0061538461538 per megabyte the entire warez economy is showing signs of going into a slump.
The warez economy had been on the upswing as a side effect of the crash of the dot-coms because many employees were given illegal copies of the companies' software as severance.
Economists speculate that the upswing in the warez economy may also have been due to many more dot-commers left with a few weeks of broadband connections previously used to telecommute and no income to buy legitimate software.
With the bad news about CDR pricing on the horizon investors are taking profits from their holdings high-tech stocks associated with warez like MP3.com, hotline.com and Napster. Said one investor "D00Z! 17'S T1ME T0 BA1L! TH3 3L33T M0N3Y 1S 1N B0NDZ!"
President Bush reaffirmed his hands off policy towards the CDR market. Spelling out that there would be no price freezes in CDR the president addressed a gathering of WAR3Z kids and said "WATZ Y0U WAN7 A HAND0U7? LAM3RZ!"