Yamaha CD-RW Drive Writes Images In Substrate

johnny5 writes: "Yamaha has recently demonstrated a new CD-RW drive that can write images into the unused space on a CD-R disc after the data track is written. The technology, called DiscT@2(TM), is due out in Japan in July. The images print on to the CD at approximately 250dpi, making graphics as well as text possible. More info can be found at Yamaha's CD-RW site (in English) as well as at Akiba PC Hotline (in Japanese, with better pictures. Babelfish for suitably akward translation). No word on a timeframe for U.S. availability"

Comments

Why Hardware?

[hesiod]

Maybe I'm missing something, but Why is it the drive itself that is important? I would think most CDs are pretty much the same (correct me if I'm wrong), so after doing a bit of math, properly enhanced CD-burning software should be able to do this, right? Well, maybe not, I never claimed to be a genius.

Cute

[Mr_Silver]

Very cute, however for the home user this won't be a hit, unless it's reasonably priced. Otherwise most people will just stick with a perminant OHP pen and write on the CD. It's cheap and it works.

For smaller companies, now that is a different matter and something likw that would be rather neat and useful.

Plus, isn't the market moving more and more towards DVD burners? I have a 4x CD burner at the moment and when I upgrade i'll be looking more and more at a hybrid CDR/RW/DVD combination job and not a 32x CDRW with the ability to burn pictures on it.

It�s a cool feature but...

[fabiolrs]

is there any actual use for this? Id rather buy a drive that burns faster than one that prints images on my CDs. That thing must cost lots of money, and its not a actual new feature, I already saw some presentation CDs here in the company I work for with text printed but I believe those were done with MUCH professional (expensive) equipment.

AOL's way ahead of them.

[Christopher Thomas]

AOL stamped their logo by similar methods into a wave of CDs a while back.

I was keeping a few as extra-pretty coasters, but they were thrown out behind my back...

Whee

[Enry]

I was doing that 10 years ago with optical cards. You could print an image on the optical surface in a similar way as the CD-RW. Of course, you couldn't put any data on there...and the writers/readers cost $10k each...and they were SCSI only...

Free CD Art

[tweakt]

Yes. But I couldn't justify the expense JUST for doing that, but that's the first /practical/ use I've read yet. CD clocks would look uber-l33t with graphics burned into them... but for added hack value, why not just put together something like a GIF2ISO... er, I mean PGN2ISO program so everyone can do it for free?

Problem solved, no need for a usable CD, it's just artwork =) No extra cost, just grab the free program.

Combine this with that Aphex Twin graphic...

[colmore]

Ahhh cool non-musical tricks for music.

It would be cooler if someone would design a disk that could display a picture in the area where data is stored (perhaps store data on a lower level, like on double-density DVDs) so you could have art on the underside of a full-length album.

Frankly I think all of this is a little bit cheesy, and while cool every once in a while, would get old fast if put into general use.

Sounds familiar

[Dooferlad]

I am sure I have heard of someone doing this before in software, but I can't find a link. It should be quite simple to do if you know bit widths and track diameters I guess. As long as Yamaha haven't patented it I can see this turning up as a plug in for CD writer software quite quickly.

This will probably start turning up on ISO's soon, and it would be cool to have a nice Debian mini-CD ISO hacked to say "Woody" in the unused space! Of course, now we have the possible pain of ISO adverts...

Good marketing

[af_robot]

I think that marketing deps just looked into numbers and figured that 90% of all CDR made by teenagers (mainly porn, divx and warez stuff)
So they named new technology according to their target group preferences.

- Hey l00k DuDe, That DiscT@2 sounds KooL :)

Re:No special hardware required (?)

[Basje]

Just a patch for mkisofs should do the trick. Tux only would be nice to begin with :)

The distance from the middle should be fixed for every data entry point on the cd (distances of the pits are fixed (except for burnproof, but those margins are slim enough, within 50 nm) && distances between tracks are fixed). Mmmm. Nice summer holidays experiment for my new CDburner.

Use rikai.com instead of Babelfish

[MaPfJa]

Hi, those who want to understand more of the Japanese text should try Rikai's free Japanese->English web reading tool. It fetches the Japanese page and inserts DHTML to provide information about the words, that simply pops up when the mouse hovers over an unknown word.

To read the page mentioned in the article simply cut-and-paste the URL.

Re:Specifications Reqirements

[esper_child]

The reason is that you will need some software to convert the bitmap into a writable image for the burner to work with. However, this is almost certainly going to be closed-source only endeveror, doing this open-sourced early in the ball game would only make it easier for competators to understand how exactly you are doing things, and possibly make a feature as good or better. You can of course burn all you want with your non-windows operating systems, but my guess is that you can only use the picture drawing tool in side of windows. This is like the case with some of my network cards that only state that they work with windows 9x and windows NT, but still work just fine in the various *NIX operating systems out there (worked with all the ones i got my hands on: FreeBSD, various flavors of Linux, and solaris).