Tom's Hardware Review of Yamaha CRW F1

Tremblay99 writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of the Yamaha CRW F1 CD burner. Not interested, you say? Well, it can burn images on the media side of a CD. While it's not the fastest burner around, it can do CD-RWs at 24x. Not bad at all."

Comments

Double sided CDs

[Ed Avis]

Why have a 'media side' at all? Why not have data on both sides of a CD?

Re:Double sided CDs

[SmlFreshwaterBuffalo]

I'm not sure if it would be physically possible or not, but I'm fairly certain it would at least require the disk to be twice as thick, and would make the manufacturing process somewhat more difficult.

Other than that, it makes sense to me, as long as they include a small label in the center saying which side is which.

Useful use of this technology

[Anonymous Coward]

If it allows you to burn pits and lands arbitarily, surely you could write data in analogue laserdisc format to CD-R?

Think how useful it would be - commercials for local TV stations could be put on CD-R. I know you can do that with recordable DVD, or just using an MPEG stream on CD-R, but this would be cheap and cost effective, assuming that the local TV station had a laserdisc player.

Admittedly you would only get about 10 minutes of laserdisc video on a standard CD-R, but it would be really cool :-).

Re:Problems

[Captain Chad]

Aside from the already-stated DRM and pr0n possibilities, I can see a use for this with promotional items. CD business cards, trial/AOL software, and (if you can do it on an audio disc) music singles.

Re:Problems

[mmoncur]

500 MB? Really? Virtually every disc I burn has 100MB or less on it. They're so cheap you can waste the space, and what better way to waste a bit of space than with a cute picture.

More importantly, you would only lose 100-200MB to print a line of text around the border. A permanent label that identifies the contents of the CD at a glance and can't be changed. I can find uses for that.

Most importantly of all, you could buy a pack of 25-cent generic CDRs, print little pine trees and snowmen on them, and use them as Xmas ornaments. Now *that's* a useful technology.

My impressions

[dnight]

I just installed one of these drives last night.

It's pretty fast, and the disk tattoo feature is really neat. I paid $180 at CDW for it. The grey(blue/whatever)scale gradients are sufficient to get a lot of detail. The Nero software will automatically thottle down the speed if the media can't handle the burn rate you select. Useful feature, imo.

And yes, you can burn porn images. I have one disc burned with 7 boob pix around it that I plan to give to a friend and tell him it's a CD full of porn. ;)

Re:Images

[Technician]

If you made coasters out of some CD's and don't have the heart to toss them, you could always put numbers along the edge and make inexpensive CD clocks for your friends and family ;-)

But no deep blue CDs available...

[dramsey]

I've got a CRW-F1. Yes, the included software-- a version of Nero 5 which, incidentally, is too stupid to match the curvature of your text to the CD (you have to adjust it manually)-- does burn text and images to the unused portion of a CDR. Too bad that on most CDs the difference between the burned and unburned portion is so slight you'll have to hold the CD up to bright light at an angle to see anything. Yamaha includes a single CD-R with a deep blue dye layer that shows off the effect very well...but so far hasn't made these special CD-Rs available for purchase.