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Sony's Double Density CD-RW Drive Reviewed
Boone^ writes: "Sony's newest CD-RW, the Spressa CRX200E-A1, is actually a DD-RW, meaning that it (re)writes on DD media that's capable of 1.3GB of data storage using the new Purple Book standard. Sony adapted the ISO 9660 format, but they narrowed the track pitch from 1.6 to 1.1 microns and shortened the minimum pit length from 0.833 to 0.623 microns. I found some benchmarks of the new drive on CDRLabs.com. So, is this just a technology hack until DVD-RW prices come down? This drive seems like a steal with a $250 USD sticker compared to the recordable DVD options." If it's on Pricewatch, it's not vapor anymore. You may have to look around a while for the double-density media, though -- and if that doesn't catch on, you'll be glad it's also a regular CD-RW drive.
Since all game consoles are sold without making any benefice, selling a device that can break the copy protection of a major competitor, is a brilliant move to cut off any revenue they make selling games and to force them out of the game console business.
Off course this is an impossible scenario since Sony is one of the major advocates for intellectual property protection.
And as we all know, systems billed as "preventing illegal copying" prevent legal copying along with it.
The way you back up a commodity hard drive is with another commodity hard drive.
I can't really get excited about 1.3G on a new, incompatible CD when Constellation 3D is so close to releasing product for Fluorescent Multi-layer Disc (FMD) technology, which can hold 20 - 100 GB on a CD-size disc.
According to the site, they're already working on WORM, and future disc capacities are predicted to be greater than 1 terabyte. With those kind of sizes, re-write ability shouldn't be a real issue for awhile. They're also saying there isn't a lot of difference in the drive technology from CDs, so drives will be similarly priced. I can't wait.
Well, just some information that I thought would be interesting to add.
Don't you mean "interesting to steal"? Shame on you for trying to pass this off as your own writing. Next time, try giving credit where it's due.
For those of us in California, Fry's carries Sony double density disks - sony brand of course. They're about $10 for a 2-pack I think. Does this mean that Sony has some kind of patent on this technology? If so, then will other manufacturers bother to make clones? Will this become like Sony's other strange media formats like the mini-disk and the memory stick?
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
It's a nice idea, and if it takes off and writable DVD doesn't, it may be good enough. Then again, as commodity hard drives are exceeeding 80GB, it gets increasigly difficult and discouraging trying to back them up. Writable DVD is in flux right now, and as soon as everyone agrees on a standard and the price of media and hardware comes down, double density cd will be gone, because the new standard will be dvd. It's the same situation when cdr drives came out.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
oh, and for the *really* bizarre, someone in the area (San Diego) actully set up a bbs running on his 102 . . . hmm, that may have been where I got the program for the xt . . .
hawk
LD ultimately failed because people didn't have the tolerance for disk-flipping, I think.
There are lots of factors, the size wasn't exactly convenient, and they were heavy. Players can get louder than with DVDs due to the drive power needed to spin them.
I don't know when it started, but LD players did end up having dual-side play. Apparently it made the players a bit taller.
I still get a few LDs mainly because they are now cheaper used (sometimes new!) than DVDs. For stuff that has a progressive/anamorphic/DD5.1 DVD I just get the DVD though as that is much better though. My player is a combo DVD/LD player so that cuts out a few considerations for me.
You're confusing Betamax with Betacam/Betacam SP. Different formats - the only commonality is tape width and the cassette shells at the smallest size. The magnetic coatings are different, the tape speeds are different, and Betacam usually uses a larger form-factor cassette as well.
And for that matter, good luck finding a non-Sony Betacam deck. Just because it's "standard" doesn't mean it's not proprietary (e.g. Microsoft).
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Remind me, again, why I would possibly want this over one of the DVD-based formats?
Doubling capacity doesn't cut it anymore - in storage, it's only worth making the leap for an order of magnitude.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Something along the lines of that single sided floppy drives were different. Apples, for example, read the bottom of the disk, while Ataris, for example, read the top side. Single sided disks are tested for one side to be reliable. So which side do they test?
It was funnier when I read it the first time with the semi-poorly drawn images of the two Beagle Brothers, but I think it was not so much what side was capable but more that the magnetic properties wouldn't bleed through to the other side (though it never happened with any of my floppies).
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
With most Apple ][ emulators, you should be able use the Karateka found at ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/gam es/action/karateka.dsk.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
At one point I used to work for a computer lab at a university around the time when the AOL floppies were coming out strong.. people would come up to me and ask why their file can't be read, and I'd look at the disk and shake my head...
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
They claim that they are "In Stock"
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
man setfdprm
One answer: No.
Search first, ask questions later.
I remember both hacks. The Apple ][ hack was actually fairly reliable. The DD -> HD hack never stored data worth anything.
:)
Not bad getting two jokes for one, though.
However, one of the decided advantages for a small shop to use CD-R for backup is the compatibility of other machines. If you backup to CD-Rs and move the media off-site to a storage location (a good practice) and the site burns to the ground. It is very easy to get the data back using almost any computer in the world today.
If you have the data in a format that is not quite as accessible as CD-R, then there is a possibility for atleast a longer delay getting access to the data. Do you have to wait 1-2 days to get a new drive shipped and installed, because the local shops do not carry this strange drive? (Of course this also applies to the various tape systems out there also.)
Yeah. I bought a special hole-puncher just for the job. worked a treat :)
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
What we're lacking here is information. Are these disks readable on CD-ROM drives? How about DVD-ROM drives, perhaps with a firmware upgrade?
Actually there was a post on /. about such a disk about 3 months ago, but it was at least a year away.
In a better world, this would be turn out to be something relatively toothless, like the "copying allowed" bit that's present (though always ignored) even in the current CD Audio spec.
But odds are it'll be something horrible in the hardware. Then I won't mind that this format is probably going to die a lingering death.
Is anybody going to come out with a format that's as free as CD-R with more capacity?
Ironically, if anyone does it's going to be a country as un-free as China, which makes a lot of $$$ off SVCD.
Except that the Chinese Communist Party and the RIAA would probably get along too well. They have hobbies in common-- like the whole ruthless-monopoly-on-power thing...
Another one is that it doesn't seem to be carry all the encryption and other baggage that DVD has: you don't need a special, expensive "for Authoring" drive and media to get around all the copyright baloney. No watermarking. No lossy compression.
I mean, DVD-R is so crippled that the latest thing in the ripping community is making "mini-DVDs", CD-Rs burnt with (a few minutes of) DVD-quality video.
If you have a multi-disc DVD changer (and more and more geeks do), then you can spread the movie out among a few CD-Rs, and have an almost seamless transition. There are even firmware hacks to make initially uncooperative players support the format.
If equipment makers get on the bandwagon, we could have a more lightweight format for VCDs, and even double-length audio CDs. I hope it takes off.
--
That game was indeed awesome. Definately the best combat-style game for the II series.
W
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-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Because the thin disk is dipped in a magnetic coating. No matter how thin it is, there is some magnetic goodness on one side AND some different particles of magneticossity on the other side. They are kept separate by the plastic disk.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
No, the analogy is correct. I have a LS-120 drive, and it read/writes 1.44MB floppies _MUCH_ faster than a standard drive. I think the boxes the drives are sold in claim that it is 27 TIMES faster than a standard floppy drive.
:)
If you can find one for about $40-$50, it's a pretty good investment. This is assuming that you still use floppies, though.
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall
That is one of my favorite all time hacks. Amaze your friends by showing them how to double their disk capacity with a hole punch!
For those who don't recall (or weren't around) you
could use the other side of a 5 1/4 floppy by cutting out the write protect tab and flipping it over.
Given that the internal plastic disk was quite thin, how did writing on one side of the disk not affect the bits stored on the other side.?
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
My point is not about whether or not the disk is coated on both sides, but rather, why writing a "0" bit on side A doesn't also write a corresponding "0" bit on side B. The magnetic field (it would seem to me), would be strong enough to act through the very thin disk and affect both sides. I suppose the answer is that my assumption is NOT true, and that the write field does not extend through to the back of the disk...
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
I loved this game too. Anyone have any luck finding/using it on one of the apple ][ emulators?
OTOH...everybody now buys CD-RW-drives because CD-R drives are just not available anymore. Still most people only use CD-R media because it's cheaper. If this new format is to become the new standard for writers, we can probably expect all CD-RW-drives to be compatible with this new standard rather soon. Even if the media won't be a success, the drive most probably will be.
0x or or snor perron?!
I wonder what kind of copy protection this format will have built in. No thank you.
> media only costs a fraction more than current CD-R media
$10 per 2-pack, according to another post. 1500% is a pretty large fraction. Note that's more than the 8x difference I cited for 2.88MB vs. 1.44MB floppies.
> drive itself is competitively priced with existing CD-R only drives
$250 vs. $80 -- that's stretching the definition of "competitive". And again, that's more than the 3x difference cited for floppy drive prices.
> this drive is bi-format
2.88MB drives had that; it wasn't enough. My money still says I won't be eating my shoe anytime soon.
cheers,
mike
... you could buy the drives from a tiny handful of vendors (check), for about 3x the money (check), with media prices only eight times higher than the 1.44MB counterparts (check), and of course they weren't readable on the massive installed base of drives (check).
And after you went to all that trouble, your stack of 600 floppies was now... only half as high! 300 floppies!
If 700MB isn't enough, then 1.xGB won't be that great, either. Certainly not enough of an improvement to throw away compatibility and incredibly low commodity prices. If this sells more than a token number of units, I'll eat my shoe.
cheers,
mike
Hmmm....look at Exchange Server, it's largely built on top of X.400....
Another consideration was that, after a while, single-sided disks disappeared from the market. With only certified double-density disks available, you might as well have punched them into "flippies" as you were wasting half the available space if you didn't.
The first box of disks we bought in 1985 for our then-new IIe was a ten-pack of double-sided TDKs (for about $27, if I recall...$2.70/disk for 280K if you punched them, 140K otherwise). I still have some of those disks, and they're still readable. By comparison, I've had 3.5" floppies go bad just days after they were written.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Entropy is only a statistical certainty. It is possible for unordered information to become ordered by random fluctuation.
It sucks to be a pedant, but is sucks more to be the target of a pedant.
Probably true.
This will come bundled with a memory stick :)
I take it that this drive will work with the very same CD-R disks I have sitting in a stack on my bookshelf. Is that correct?
Back when NeXT used the 4Mbyte floppies, a lot of people still used floppies for footnet, and none of the PC's or Mac's would read the 4 meg disks.
Nowadays, when I burn a CD for backup, it's pretty rare that I ever put that disk in a different drive than the one that made it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm still waiting on the consortium between the NSA, IBM, Microsoft and Sun to form so I could have a 1gig chip implanted in my head that plugs into any outlet which is connected to a 1terrabit drive created by clustered Clariion's which stores the data in my head for STORAGE PURPOSES ONLY thank you.
;)
Want Root?
The cake is a pie
i've got an lsd-120 drive
one thing about it that is nice is that when using normal floppy disks it isn't the loudest contraption known to man.... is there something in the floppy drive spec that says 1.44 mb drives have to make the same floppy access noises as apple 2's?
i didn't get the lsd-120 drive willingly though.... it was forced upon me by my school's technology program.... and actually i've loaned mine out all year to another student who is too lazy to get hers... she has lsd-120 disks
Need a Catering Connection
I wouldn't blame the failure of Beta to Sony's lack of marketing. I'd blame it on VHS decks being very significantly cheaper, the fact that Beta tapes only held an hour's worth of video, and that the quality was good enough for taping broadcast television.
Laserdisc never had mass-market appeal because the disks were much more expensive than VHS, because most people didn't care enough about the quality to drop the money, and that therefore most movies didn't see the light of day on LD and LD rentals are basically unheard of. DVDs are catching on because they're cheaper and you don't have to flip the disc [as often].
-bugg
This sounds exactly like what the dreamcast uses. Only difference is the dreamcast GD-ROMS can only hold about 1 gig because there is an audio track at the beginning, and the 'high density' session starts a little while into the disc.
pcstop.com seems to have them available for order. doesn't specify whether they are "in stock" or not though.
I wasn't allowed to touch my dad's C64 (with disk drive) I was relegated to the VIC-20 with (audio)tape drive.
I did use the 5.25 trick in my Jr. High AppleSoft BASIC class, though.
-Peter
I hate to nitpick one of the only people who understands that I'm not talking about 5.25s but . . .
:-(
720k floppies are "double density" 1.44s are "high density" (Look for the groovy HD logo printed on (or more often molded into) the disk.
Couldn't get my cool ASCII art past the lameness filter
You are absolutely right about the media being different though. The coercivity is different. In fact, if I recall correctly the fields are aligned 90 degrees out (but that may be 2.88s.)
I'm pretty sure all PC drives read both sides, no flipping.
-Peter
Noooo. Jeeze that's an Apple ][ hack.
What you are talking about is doubling the useable sides, not density.
You used to be able to get a "special" hole punch (out of the back of Computer Shopper, back before it sucked. Damn internet!) that put an extra hole in a "Double Density" (720k) floppy so that the drive would see it as a "High Density" (1.44M) floppy.
It didn't work worth a damn (my dad bought one, he's pretty cheap) because the "coercivity" (amount of energy required to make the magnetic state change) of the media is different.
The thing that makes this all super on-topic is that Sony created the 3.5 in diskette!
-Peter
Where can I get a hole punch that will convert my regular CDRs to DD-CDRs?
-Peter
PS: It's a joke. If you don't get it just move on.
-P
anyway, I own a DC and I burn CDs on a mac or under linux, but I have as yet to be able to successfully make anything but a coaster from the various DCMP3, demo, and such releases. I tried to get the broadband passport CD (why it wasn't included with my expensive BBA I'll never understand), but all I can find for any of these are nero images and cd juggeler (something) images. Nero Max on the Mac won't even recognize .nrg images (even with the correct filetype/creator info). Why doesn't someone just convert all those more proprietary image formats to something like a .iso format that'll work with linux and toast?
-Daniel
I may me an idiot, but I'm well aware of 2 things. 1) that an .iso format is in fact just a dump of the disc contents that matter. 2) that the formats in which I've been able to find DC software CD images (legal projects based stuff), are not just dumps of the disc contents, but rather some information which the intended burning software interprets into track divisions, track types, and track data, for which I have no software that makes sense of it.
Thanks again,
-Daniel
You could by 400 normal cd-rw's instead a be compatible with everyone else.
Wait, I got too much money.
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
The big thing that CD-R had going for it (and hopefully DVD-R will follow suit) is that it was functional in a huge number of existing devices. CDs were wildly popular in both computers and stereo systems by the time that CD-Rs became feasible for the end user. That's why everyone HAD to have one when they became cheap... this single device would copy audio CDs, data CDs AND mixed mode CDs... it was an awesome tool.
Hopefully DVD-Rs will follow suit, and become functional in regular DVD players and DVD-ROM drives. Again, the major advantage is the fact that there's already a huge number of DVD devices out there in the wild. That's why everyone wants a writer - to be able to write discs for a device they already own.
This format will fail... if not soon, in the long run. The problem, is they've put the cart before the horse - they're making a writer for a format that doesn't have any real world existance as of yet. There's no appeal - larger storage is already available in DVD-Rs, and the new higher density CD doesn't have any compatability with existing CD devices. Plus, it's a different kind of media, so you can't even use your old CD media in this device. I can't see a single reason to pick this new format for anything... the ONLY bright spot is that the writer doubles for a standard CD writer, but then why not just buy a regular CD writer?
Thus, in my opinion, this format is doomed. Standard or not.
The presence of Double Density CDs on the market could even lead to further revision of the VCD standard. By just allowing Variable Bit Rate and rising the 1374kbps limit of the current White Book; you can have very good quality simple Mpeg1 video storage format, that could make very cheap VCD Players with twice duration and crisp non blocky quality. Of course you can achieve even more if you also allow Mpeg 2/4 and mp3/aac audio in the stream; but this will make the device cost a bit higher; which still could cost a fraction of your average DVD player.
Uncrippled of any kind of restriction nonsense; an underground "supported by the people" alternative distribution format like this could easily succeed; at least in many, many countries that can not afford anything else anyway. In fact i believe it is a matter of when will they get more popular.
--
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
What about DVD RAMS? They're starting at $135 on pricewatch.com...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
ATI just announced today that they are shipping the ALL-IN-WONDER RADEON PCI card which features 32 MB SDR memory, Personal Video Recorder (PVR) technology, a stereo TV tuner, DVD playback with Dolby(R) Digital 5.1 surround sound and video output. The graphics card offers video editing enthusiasts the ability to capture and edit MPEG-2 video for creating professional-looking home movies. Video CD creation - When combined with popular CD creation software such as Roxio Easy CD Creator, you can create your own MPEG-compliant Video CDs for playback on a consumer DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) player.
BTW, Iomega just announced their10 and 20 gig Peerless storage system. It looks like the sucessor to their zip drives. It will be hard to beat CDs though since blank CDs are so cheap.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Only doubling the normal CD capacity at a time when greater capacity R/W media are on horizon leads to a problem of the timing / critical mass variety.
I work in an industry where files & data sets routinely range from 400MB to 32GB.
For archival and client data purposes we use 1-4 CD's for stuff under 2GB & tape for larger sets & permanent archive.
With 30 years of data in the vault, we tend to stick to 'long term' methods & only upgrade storage media types on a 5/6 year time frame.
Even with the advent of DD-CDR's we are unlikely to change over as we would end up posting clients data on media that they can't yet read.
Halving the number of CD's stored or posted isn't worth the data portability issues created.
By the time DD-CDR's have matured and become common, we would be looking for the next great portable media with a capacity of 2-4 GB's.
This kind of approach would be pretty common in many established industries & government departments.
The exploration industry still embraced CD-R's wholeheartedly when they first appeared, quite a few offices still have original model KODAK external SCSI single speed CD burners, from the days when these weighty beasts cost a few grand $US.
Well, first, I have one.. but, your analogy is off. LS-120 can read/write 1.44mb disks, but they do so at a slower rate than 1.44mb-only drives. Add to that the fact that the drives cost a few times more than a good 1.44mb drive, and the media cost much more than cheap-o 1.44mb disks, and the analogy dosen't hold water. None of which is to say I'm going out tomorrow to buy one a ddrw, but still...
Linus has,in fact,grown,and explosively-JonKatz
I assure you, if I could find an MD drive for my comp (write music not data) I wouldn't use anything else for portable music.
I ate my sig.
True it hasn't taken off in the US, but if you've been to Japan lately, its a different story.
I ate my sig.
the way i see it, this will take off like the LS-120 drives. come on, show of hands, who has one? that's what i thought. the new itanium boxes use ls-120 instead of floppies, but besides them? well, the prototype itanium's were. maybe i'm not supposed to say anything about them, but i didn't sign the nda, the company did. and they fired me, so.....
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
Does this DD-RW have any copy protection built in?
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
DivX movies. Hell, I spent the extra money for 80 minute cdr, just to get an extra bit of space to encode 2 hour movies at a more watchable quality. On a 1.2 gig cd, it'd be damn near DVD quality!
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Which one?
No point if the drives don't have BURNProof.
You'll just get more expensive coasters.
Cheerio,
Link.
I've been thinking of getting a new CD-R[W] drive lately, and seems like I will take a bite out of this one. It seems pretty cool. I mean, 1.3 GB on a single disc!
As for compatibility issues, I hardly ever share my CD-RW discs with anyone, I usually use it to store/backup my personal files that may change over time. And of course, if I convince my friends to buy this then there's no other problems.
I haven't checked elsewhere for all the details, but does this drive burn the new media format at 12X? For 1.3GB, this would be almost 20 minutes, which may be a little unacceptable.
Or am I too old for anyone to catch this reference?
- Betamax stores about 10 or 20 more lines of resolution than plain VHS. Whoopty...
:-)
- Don't forget the heads on all those old players (since you'd be hard pressed to find one new) are worn out.
- BetaCam (the studio format) is EXPENSIVE and not exactly availiable in RadioShack.
Sorry, but SVHS wins. It is a very good (but not the best, for that you need BetaCam) quality tape format. It holds about 400 lines of resolution (Am I remembering right that DVDs hold about this many too?). It can be had at radio shack and most finer home audio shops too (here, in Canada, FutureShop sells the tapes), and the VCRs are in stores right now for less than $199 US! That and the tapes are about $5 US each.
I've got a JVC HR-S3600U SVHS deck that I'm impressed with, and I've never done any production before (never mind that I've never taken a broadcasting class before).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Actually, the stock Win/DOS drivers will still let you read/write up to 21 sectors and 83 tracks per side, that's 1.743MB.
You'll either need a special format utility or format it in some other OS like linux. superformat is another unix utility for this. Once formatted, Windows will happily use it at 1.743MB. By tweaking out the geometry using variable size sectors, you can get linux to use the disk all the way up to the rated 2.0MB. Warning: not all "HD" disks are actually rated to 2.0MB any more, don't try this with those old AOL disks.
-Ryan C.
I have a side-flipping model (Pioneer CLD-3060), they have been around forever. Pioneed even made a 2-drawer model (LD-W2 I think), where each platter got each side played. But side-flipping added a lot to the cost, and AFAIK most LD people didn't have that feature.
Laserdisc never had mass-market appeal because the disks were much more expensive than VHS
;)
I have been collecting laser disks since the late '80s, so I know a little about this.
Back in The Day, LD was a STEAL. Years ago a pre-recorded videotape was often $90+. Yes, even popular movies. VHS wasn't always a buyer's market, it started as a renter's market. You were expected to get your VHS fix from the neighborhood rental store, and tapes were priced insanely high, because stores bought them, not individual people.
LD, on the other hand, was priced for collectors. In 1989 I could buy Die Hard on VHS for $100, or I could buy it on DVD for $50. Many DVDs were only $30-40, when the video tapes cost up to twice as much! Us laser disc people were smug up until the late 80s, and rightfully so. We were getting a good approximation of the DVD experience years ahead of schedule, and for less money than a VHS habit would have cost.
Eventually the studios figured out they could make a forune from selling $10 VHS tapes of hit movies in supermarkets, and at this point the LD price advantage disappeared. For the most popular software, anyway -- but there were still lots of more obscure movies and specials you could get on LD far cheaper than VHS.
There was never a software scarcity problem with LDs, either. I could find any movie I wanted, it's not like only the top 10 were pressed onto LD. There was also a lot of educationa;/reference programming... I have this great Apollo project documentary with zillions of stills and lots of footage. That was just never released on VHS that I know of.
Of course things are changed now, but Back Then LD was a sweet thing. I got about 10 good years of use out of my $1000 LD player.
LD ultimately failed because people didn't have the tolerance for disk-flipping, I think. It was also poorly marketed. DVDs succeeded because they are smaller, have less flipping, have better image/sound, and are usually less expensive too. I've switched to DVD and I have never looked back, though there are still some LDs that I continue to use -- Star Wars, for example.
I will always miss that weird laser disc smell, though... the color printing on the jacket, and the plastic and adhesives of the disc... kind of like a new car smell. Good memories.
Another contender in the battle to become the de facto high-density storage medium for the digital world could come from US data storage specialist, C3D, in the shape of its revolutionary optical storage technology that promises to deliver capacities of 140GB and above on a single multilayer disc.
With conventional optical disc drive technology signal quality degrades rapidly with the number of recording layers. This is principally because of optical interference - noise, scatter, and cross-talk resulting from the fact that the probing laser beam and the reflected signal are of the same wavelength and the nature of the highly coherent reflected signal used. The signal degradation exceeds acceptable levels with the result that no more than two recording layers are possible. However, with fluorescent readout systems, the quality degrades much more slowly, and C3D believes that up to 100 memory layers are feasible on a standard sized CD.
The design of the discs is based on so-called 'stable photochrome', discovered by physicists and engineers in Russia. This is a transparent organic substance whose fluorescence can be triggered by a laser beam for sufficient time for it to be detected by a standard photoreceiver. This characteristic makes it possible to superimpose transparent layers on top of one another, and to 'write' information on each level.
Once the fluorescence is stimulated by the laser light, both coherent and incoherent light are emitted. The latter has waves that are slightly out of step with each other, and the exploitation of this property is central to C3D's technology. The out-of-sync fluorescent light beams allow data to be read through different layers of the stacked transparent discs, one beam reading data from the top layer at the same time that others are penetrating it to read from lower layers. The result is the twin benefit of huge storage capacities and greatly improved data retrieval speeds.
Well, just some information that I thought would be interesting to add.
However, if you want to use your "back ups (huh huh)", the Sega DC will need to be able to read these DD-Rs. What do you think the chance is that it is able? That's right. Very little.
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Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness. -- Bertrand Russell
Currently it won't play on jack squat except for Sony's DD-R burner itself.
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Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness. -- Bertrand Russell
Someday, a fully functional DC emulator may come. Maybe, then the back ups will be useful. They will probably be more useful than the originals, actually, since none of the computer CD drives I know of will read GD-ROMs (I heard rumors that there are Yamaha drives that can read them, but I never checked up on it).
Plus there is some good karma associated with the preservation of the games themselves, even if you can't directly play them.
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Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness. -- Bertrand Russell
And this of course being the question that determines whether they sell 3 units or 3 million.
-antipop
Geez, look at you guys..
"Can anything other than the dd-r drive play these? No? Well then it's a dead-end and will never be supported! fuck it!"
uhm, scuse me?
When dvd's first came out, how many times did I hear "Why can't we record on it? It's no good if we can't record on it! It'll never catch on!"
(Not like I've recorded or even used my vcr in the past year..)
If Sony doesn't fuck up the license terms for this, like they have with so many of their 'techs' (minidisc, memory stick, etc..), then many cd-rw drives will be able to incorperate this tech and it will be there if you need it.
Hello? It uses the exact same lasers mcfly!
The only diff is that they slow down the rotational speed and make the pits smaller.
I bet cd/dd-rom drives (read only.. like cd-rom drives) would cost exactly $5-10 more than regular cd-rom drives.
repeat after me, "It's all about the chips"
Hell, I bet some drives could have a firmware upgrade to support this, as long as the program controlled the relevant parts.
-since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
This is the place that is selling it... hope the e-commerce site doesn't get slash-dotted... Click here...
Look around the auctions on "www.yahoo.cojp". The Sony Data MDs with a SCSI interface pop up every now and again.
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
Actually think about it for a second:
- A technology nobody will actually buy
- It is somewhat practical (you have to admit that)
- It looks almost exactly like a regular old CD.
This could be the ultimate encrypted storage! Since they're sure to only sell about 100 of these drives, it would be pretty easy to figure out who stole your sensitive information (or Divx movies), and useless to everyone else!
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
Unless I missed out on something, the various "book" standards (Red Book, Orange Book, etc) are usually open or atleast available to competitors, so there's no reason to believe their Purple Book standard won't be the same way. Plus, even Sony has to realize that the key to mass adoption of a media format isn't just advertising, it's getting cheaper drives and media out into the publics hands.
I'll admit though, Sony does do a little overkill on media formats (Mini-Disc, as an example of one that pretty much flopped).
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Thanks for the clarification. =) I don't travel overseas, so knowing what's popular elsewhere isn't my strong-suit. I know they certainly made an agressive push in the US (going so far as to release actual albums on MiniDisc, a practice I believe they still perform). Plus you find a lot of different vendors making both MD media and MD drives (eg: Pioneer now sells an MD drive that supports read/write).
I guess flop was a little harsh; it hasn't exactly taken America by storm. ;)
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
You could, I don't know, maybe try reading the linked-to article?
I'll play nice and answer your questions though--
* They aren't readable in normal CD-ROM drives.
* I doubt a firmware upgrade will make them readable in DVD-ROM drives.
Otherwise, the drive itself will read and write both CD-R, CD-RW as well as -R and -RW versions of this new format. So, compatibility aside, there's no real reason to pick another CD-R drive over this one since this one is priced almost the same. My only legitimate reason to hold off is that I'd like to buy a SCSI version of the drive. =)
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Unfortunately old technologies never seem to die ;) Most BIOS still support the 2.8 MB floppy disks. Hell, most BIOSes still support DOS! And remember ISA? Yeah its still around.
Got friends?
Why don't you do it yourself? Go to www.dccopyworld.com and grab the converters. There's Linux and Mac software to convert CDIs to ISOs, and you'll also have to get a Toast version of the boot disc, since you can't make bootable discs from ISOs.
Before we keep flaming sony for not adhereing to a standard (which is true in a lot of cases), the new drive does adhere to the proposed (and I believe certified) Purple Book specification. Now if wether or not someone else will adopt this, I don't know...
--The space between my ears was intentionally left blank--
it's a real disk...click here--> http://www.c-3d.net
A penny to anyone that finds out the proposed street price for the media on this thing. And I'm not kidding.
~
If you're going to be a pedant, you first have to know what the hell you're talking about.
The only certainty is entropy.
Although it's not clear just how this will be affected by various DVD initiatives, the reason to go for it is because it's standard, it's cheap (both for the drive and the media), and it's available. Eventually, I'd say you could expect certain classes of CD usage today to migrate to this technology. Just because we have DVDs today doesn't mean that manufacturers are going to abandon the CD format altogether. Even though we have CDRs, floppies are still useful. Eventually, we may see regualr CDs go the way of 768 KB floppies.
The only certainty is entropy.
Cute! That's ranks up there with Monty Python's three sided albulm. (One side of the record had a double groove. Depending on where the needle dropped, you got one of two seperate plays.)
*sigh* I'm going to have to explain needles and spiral mechanically encoded records aren't I? Well bugger off you young punks!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Aparently 'Purple Book' is or will become an open standard. As far as I know, ONLY sony and philips have embraced it (as the co-authors, they'd better embrace it). The key to the success of this drive will be adoption of the standard. It really won't be much use without cross-vendor support (unless you want to use it within a closed system as backup media, which seems like a waste to me).
I have not yet seen any other vendors developing drives to this standard, which means mass adoption by users is still a long way off. Let's hope for Sony's sake that they timed the introduction of this product well enough that it will not imediately be suplanted with lower cost DVD-ROM drives which should be coming out soon.
As it is, this new drive seems to be the Ink Jet printer of the CD-ROM universe. Vary cheap hardware, on which the vendor either brakes even or takes a loss, then vary expensive media on which the manufacturer makes a killing.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I thought Sony was the one who wanted 12 inch discs until they realized it would play for 7 hours or something.
If they can press down DVD-RW prices then they figure they'll start appearing in computers come this fall. A new Windows is likely to lead to a pick-up in computer sales through the fall and x-mas seasons on into next year.
Sony would sure love to get prices down so DVD-RW's start appearing on computers by the third quarter. Media sales would go up. DVD-RW drive sales would go up. Presumably, DVD sales would go up (and sony can make money there also).
Of course, I might just be a conspiracy nut!
--- Open Source = Freedom not free.
BTW you don't want Rao's book on Thermodynamics and Stoichiometry of Metallurgy, it should be one on Statstical Thermodynamics. IIRC, but as I mentioned, he was an ass, so I'm not inclined to look that hard.
Obviously the topic above is grossly simplified, and generalized, but the original prior respondants statements were true, from a certain point of view. In anycase, if you flame me, at least choose an aspect that merits it, like my spelling.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
www.cdrinfo.com/cebit2001/tdk-1.shtml Write 2GB CDR's are 36x and the SAME price per meg? The hell you say? Well if ya don't buy the sketchy details and pictures of cdrinfo, maybe A more properly formated press clipin from them might help :). And just to be thorough, one from EE Times.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
in response to all the threads about how this technology is going to be a "deadend" lets not forget who we're dealing with here. this isn't some company from bumfuck, idaho, its Sony. Knowing their history collaborating with Phillips, among other companies, i would not be supprised to see multiple vendor dd-r/w drives out later this year. hell, even if no other companies back the technology originally, Sony could still push this technology hard enough to succeed, after all, if they sell the media for the same price, and the drive (ok, don't tell me that they can't sell media costing them 5 cents to make for the same price as 7 cent/disc media ;), and the article states that the same laser technology is being employed, assumedly with a more accurate drive system, so the actual parts should be of similar cost for the drives) who's gonna choose a $1 650 MB disk over a $1 1.3 GB disk?
basically what i'm trying to say is that the 2.88 vs 1.44 MB floppy-drive-failure analogy brought up earlier isn't very valid for two reasons. first, the importance of floppy drives was dimishing at the time, with no real need to have a 2.88 MB boot disk vs a 1.44 MB boot disk (hey they do the same thing, its not like i care if one can almost hold a better program while the other can't). CD drives are used for storage, and the need for storage is constantly growing, scalability at a cost is the name of the game. if we were to draw any analogy it should be between 720KB and 1.44MB floppy drives. they were accepted because 720KB wasn't enough for proper boot disks under many circumstances. go look at that 725MB movie file thats sitting on your hd cause its 5 MB past the 700MB disk overburn limit and tell me you wouldn't like to have that 1.3 GB cd.
oh, plus, check the pic of this thing ... its silver!!@(*#%! ;)
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
I think the problem with this super-media is it's price. Sure, you can go buy a DVD disc for $20, but when CD-Rs are running at $.20 a peice, why bother? I sure as hell am going for the cheap alternative, even if it takes me a tiny bit of exchange time. However, I'm never one to turn down new technologies. Then again, they said Rambus would be super-great too. So far, the benchmarks are saying otherwise.
Seeka
When I first read about this, I thought it was going to be some proprietary thing that won't work out. Well, I still do. The thing with CD-R? and DVD-R? is that they have multiple uses. Just look, there's Video CDs, Photo CDs, and now even cameras that write directly to them. It's kind of like the SuperDisk. Only one or two companies, as major as they are, making hardware for this format is not going to work out. I know someone might say, "yeah, but what about the Zip disk?" so I'll cover that. See, Zip got the advantage because it came out before conventional CD-Rs, and 100mb on rewritable disk slightly bigger than a floppy disk was pretty cool. The trend grew, and Iomega became more of a household name. Now, even though Sony is a big player, I still think this won't last too long. Of course, this is just my opinion, but I JUST don't think it will work.
blog & fiction: jd87
Will there be *NIX support via CD-Record?
With any luck, this is the technology hack that will force DVD-RW prices to come down!!
Consider that if you were a DVD-RW manufacturer, you wouldn't want the public wasting their time falling more in love with their CD-R/RW formats instead of upgrading to your DVD-R/RW format, would you?
Competition is supposed to be a good thing, right? A $250 price tag ($217 on Pricewatch!!) on this model really ought to rattle some cages over on the DVD-side of the street. Let's hope this helps knock some of those DVD prices down to more acceptable levels. :-)
Pretty trippy
Rats. I was holding out for the Blue With Pink Stripe Book standard.
Or maybe Bluish Green With a Hint of Yellow Book.
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When it's supported by enough multiple vendors it will cease to be proprietary.
A bunch of stiffs from academia can set up all the 'standards' they want. It's still just another zip disk if only one vendor supports it.
IOW: we'll see how it fares in the market.
I burn a lot of VCDs lately, but I'm definitely not interested in this drive. I went out and got a set-top DVD player that I was certain could play back from regular CDR media and also CDRW media. It would be worthless for this kind of disk. All the regular CD drives I use read regular 650 or 700 MB disks that I can burn.
Sorry, this reeks of proprietary. It'll die the way 2.88 MB floppy disks died. Good riddance.
WRONG! The smaller the laser wavelength, the smaller and more tightly focussed the laser and therefore you can burn a smaller dot in the ink. BTW, you can burn a smaller dot in the ink with an infrared laser (yep, thats what they are) as well but there really isn't any improvement until you go to high-frequency ultraviolet and X-ray lasers. Take a look at a scale chart of the EM spectrum and you'll see just how insignificant the difference between red and blue lasers is.
-==-
We are Microsoft. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Just because it is an ISO standard does not make it viable. Have you read your X.400 e-mail on an OSI network stack lately?
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
So we have a "HD" CD-RW drive.. which is great, except that the media will only read in the same drive, or others like it. This makes every CDROM, audio CD player, etc obsolete which really isn't a good thing. I think it would be nice if the Purple Book Standard was developed to be downwards compatible .. ie: the DD CDs would be readable - at least in part - by existing 650-700MB drives.
You see, if you went out and bought a nice fast 52x CDROM yesterday, spent the money, and then you get one of these drives, then what use is it? I've got 2 CDROMs in most of my machines, but this means I'd have to have a $250USD drive in each.
Oh, and the only thing the extra space would be good for would be Audio, MP3, MPEG, DiVX, etc. If you've got an MP3 player (portable.. not on your PC) then you couldn't use the extra space.
Anyways, though Sony does come out with some very very decent stuff, I think this new drive is just like the MiniDisc. Extra features (more space, higher quality) but after a while some equipment will support one standard and the rest will support the other standard. It won't affect most people because major computer manufacturers will not use one type (who knows which standard they'll pick). Either way, the DD-R media had better be less than 2x the price of a normal CD-R and easy to get... otherwise the format will fall on it's face.
"Life is a donut.. it goes around and around, but there is always a hole in the center."
- Anonymous