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

Finally!!

[OmniVector]

No more losing my WaReZ cd keys!

Hack

[Lord Ender]

For anyone wondering what the word 'hack' actually means, THIS IS IT.

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.

Re:Cute

[Jucius Maximus]

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

Do not underestimate the 'gimmick marketing potential' of this idea. Let me explain:

I'm not talking about marketing this actual Yamaha drive. I am talking about using graphic-ized CDs as marketing tools in themselves to sell other products.

If a company wants to sell something and have their marketing materials stand out, the marketing materials must have some sort of neat quirk. This can be in the form of a keychain with a built in puzzle, those business card shaped CDs, or whatever. They're neat things. The first time I got a business card shaped CD (marketing from MSFT no less) I did not believe when someone told me it was a real disc so I put it in my machine, and played the marketing video on the CD. Lo and behold it worked. And I ended up watching their marketing video.

I think that CDs with graphics burned on the back of them would have similar appeal.

Re:This can be done now...

[iangoldby]

The visibility of the burned track depends on the kind of substrate used on the particular CD blank. Green ones show up best. Pale yellow ones are often almost invisible.

Does this mean that the Yamaha drive will only be effective on green CDs, or does the laser use a different strength to burn the piccies?

Digital's PDP-1 paper tape did it first!

[dpbsmith]

Obligatory complaint: why, this is barely news at all; a very similar story was reported in Slashdot just a few decades ago, in 1961.

The PDP-1 used eight-channel punched paper tape as the predominant storage medium, punching at a speedy 60 characters per second and reading at an ungodly-fast 200 characters per second.

On program tapes, prior to the start of the actual binary program data, the assembler would punch a human-readable label in which the title was spelled out in human-readable format in the block letters made out of patterns of holes. IIRC a 5x7 matrix, a little ugly because a horizontal line of little feed holes ran through the center of the character which meant that not only did the characters look "overstruck," but the spacing between rows 3 and 4 was a little wider than the spacing between other rows.

I wonder what the earliest use of "kludging directly human-readable data into a medium that was intended only to be machine-readable?"

I seem to recall that IBM card decks had a couple of preamble cards in which the punches spelled out a code number in block letters.