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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.
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?
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
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.
One answer: No.
Search first, ask questions later.
The Dreamcast uses what's called a GD-ROM. The GD-ROM holds about a Gigabyte of data. The storage itself isn't copy protection, as it's simply a way to squeeze more data onto a disk.
The layout of a DC disc is broken up into two tracks. The first track consists solely of a four second audio snip - any kind, even silence. The second track is simply a CD/XA data track using a standard ISO9660 file system with the first 16 sectors of the track used as a bootstrap.
So basically, if you had a Gigabyte CD, you could make Dreamcast discs. GDROM discs are perfectly readable in standard CDROM drives; you need no special hardware to read them.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Actually there was a post on /. about such a disk about 3 months ago, but it was at least a year away.
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.
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
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?!
> 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
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.
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 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
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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?
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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!
Or am I too old for anyone to catch this reference?
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.
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...
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.
Incorrect. The first area is a low density, standard CD format of about 35 megs/4 mins. Then there's a space containing no data, and then the high density area begins (1Gig/112mins).
The low density area must contain two tracks, a Mode 1 and a CDDA, both containing at least 4 seconds of data. The high density area must also contain two tracks, both Mode 1. The first of which must contain at least 4 seconds of data. The second high density Mode 1 track contains the bulk of the data.
So basically, if you had a Gigabyte CD, you could make Dreamcast discs. GDROM discs are perfectly readable in standard CDROM drives; you need no special hardware to read them.
Incorrect. When you insert a GD-ROM into a standard CD drive, what you see is the 35meg low density area only. You cannot read the high density area in a standard CD drive.
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
Jesus, I just realized that the grammer in that post is worse than in the Zero Wing intro.
Overrated? It wasn't even rated... I need an easy way to post things without using this blasted karma bonus. The no score +1 deal would be even worse. And I'm not even a karma whore...
Eh? My +1 says "No Score +1 Bonus" and is always unchecked. I figured it would post at 3 and disallow moderation (for really inflammatory comments or something I guess). What a really need is a (score=1) button that just disallows any karma math yet still allows moderation. I realize I could post anon, but that shouldn't have to be the case.
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.
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 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
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. :-)
Rats. I was holding out for the Blue With Pink Stripe Book standard.
Or maybe Bluish Green With a Hint of Yellow Book.
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.
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