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?

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.

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 ;-)