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Yamaha To Withdraw From CD-R/RW Business
An anonymous reader writes "What's going on. When I first heard this I thought it was a bad joke. They make great burners! 'Tokyo, February 5, 2003 - Yamaha Corp. decided at a board meeting to cease sales of CD-R/RWs for personal computers and to withdraw completely from the business by the end of March 2003.'"
Does any other company make burners that can burn an image on the CD?
Back when I used to work at BestBuy I got a great deal on a 24x burner, but I had so many problems with it that I returned it for a 12x TDK VeloCD. I guess I don't really care if Yamaha stops making them, as I wouldn't buy one.
cd-r/w's are running into the $40 range these days- yamaha doesn't want to / can't compete at those prices, so they'll stick with higher margin dvd burners. makes good business sense.
Well i can understand them dropping out of the market .. can you imagine the development costs for burning on the wrong side of the CD?
Sig Nazi- "No Sig for you, come back 1 year."
The RIAA/MPAA are finally getting what they want. Companies are bailing on cd burners. What's next, OS's designed without the 'copy' command for the sake of preventing piracy?
Yeah, they made good burners. But any tech geek worth his salt knows Plextor is besto. I have an old plextor 8/4/32a. It burns a cdr in about 10 minutes. It can get by any sort of copy protection with the appropriate software. And I've never had buffer underrun. Ever. The newer Plextors are even faster and even more high quality. No burner is better. So, even though Yamaha burners don't suck, cause they don't, they aren't the best. And I probably would never have bought one. So, who cares.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
He means "image" as in making a pretty picture on the non-data side of the CD. Read the link in the fucking article, genius boy.
and yamaha knows they arent in a position to compete with the likes of Lite-on, Msi, LG, etc. Face it, the CD-RW has reached the end point as far as innovation goes. A modern Lite-on burner can record to even the shittiest media, handles most forms of copy protection without grief, can be purchased for under $60, and never coasters a disk.
The next big frontier is Dvd recorderables, which is still a mess. And i am sure thats what yamaha is looking at for potential profits.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
..they keeping making cycles like the YZF R-1 I'm happy. CD burners are a commodity item, I don't care about the brand name. Remember, they are the music & motorcycles company.
In related news an RIAA accountant reported the mysterious dissapearence of millions of dollars from the organizations budget. Across the Pacific in Tokyo, a Yamaha senior exectuive just bought himself a new Ferrari.
you are a moron.
a) burning "images" on a cd i just a marketing thing, generally speaking the average user that burns cds would like to use ALL of the cd for data (or music!!!!) storage. b) as has been mentioned before, cdrws are cheap, they will remain cheap, therefor they can't mark up the cdrws to the place where they will be happy. (Thank companies like lite-on.... I do daily :) ).
Yamaha's have always been known as decent burners, if more then a little overpriced. They won't be missed by most of the community.
List of things that won't be around much longer:
... and it's been my experience that there are cheaper and more reliable alternatives out there now. Samsung in particular is what we use most of the time. They're inexpensive and reliable, and we've had maybe 1 bad unit in 500. I don't remember exact numbers, but we used to have a pretty high DOA or >6mo failure on the Yamaha IDE burners (their SCSI burners were always great, but then again they were expensive, too).
On a broader view, I see that burners are becoming commodized (sp?). Anyone can make a burner these days. Perhaps they'll stay in the semi-cutting edge markets like DVD burning?
You IP lovers will not get what you want. Things will only get MUCH worse for you, soon we'll have no intellectual property laws at all. Your utopia of intellectual property control will never happen.
very clever.
I about spit Dr Pepper all over my monitor.
Sent from your iPad.
You are annoying. Quit posting stories in the comments, with your own, off topic, pseudo-political messages, when there is no need to. Who is voting this stuff up? You don't even trim the unnecessary stuff. The site is not slashdotted, you are just being a bitch.
I think they were referring to the ability to 'burn' an image physically onto the top face of the CD itself.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
Someone seriously needs to mod this one up (or mod the original down, as it's extremely dumb and pointless). He's right, the original poster obviously didn't read the Tom's Hardware article about the CD writer that can create pictures on the bottom of the CD (well, only where no data is written.. making the feature virtually useless).
Yamaha released an burner that allowed you to burn an image to the blank portion of a CD-R
So, if you only filled half the disc with data, you'd have a portion of empty space around the outside where the burner could write an image - say your company logo, or some text or graphics.
It was slow, however, and only monochromatic. It looked cool though.
I remember reading a review of the burner that makes images on the cd and vaugely rememeber reading that this was going to be their last drive.
e x.html
Found the link, its here: http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20020927/ind
and the quote:
"Since the CRW 3200, Yamaha had been sitting on the sidelines of the speed race with no offer of a 32 or 40X recorder, as opposed to the rest of the providers in the market, though they were by no means resting on their laurels. They were actually developing what was to become their last CD-RW recorder before going on to the DVD+RW."
I don't know how many other people out there were dedicated fans of Yamaha's drives, but I can tell you as a user who owns both their old 6x4x16 and 24x10x40 model of internal SCSI burners that they are really unparalleled. For the upper end market demanding the performance of SCSI (which most other drive makers have abandoned, but alas I won't go off on my SCSI rant today :) these were the best drives, and were reliable (almost all the failed burns were a result of third party software or other software problems that resulted from my own mistakes). I recall many times when I would be burning a cd, while either doing on graphics work, gaming, or watching a movie, and these things kept on burning.
Its a sad day to see one of the pioneers of burning technology leave the arena. They will be missed.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
Hey, with new technology that allows DVD media to burn and hold 27GB of data per side, I'm not surprised they are pulling out of CD-R/RW. Maybe they'll jump into the DVD business.
-Valiss
Thats not what was meant. By "image" the writer meant a pattern on the surface of the disk itself. More info available here.
Yamaha burners have been lacking in quality lately and they were way overpriced. Back when plextor and yamaha were the only decent cd burners on the markey (when 8x was new) they were among the best out. Lately companies like lite-on have produced sub $70 burners and yamaha just cannot compete at that level. I still have one of their 4x scsi burners and it has never failed me.
>> Quit posting stories in the comments, with your own, off topic, pseudo-political messages, when there is no need to.
michael does the same thing on the front page. so whats yer beef?
Perhaps you should read the link before posting.
Some yamaha burners can actually burn a picture onto the media side of the cd. Its pretty useless but it looks very very cool.
Actually, I can understand their decision. When the market is flooded with companies that make a product, R&D can become very costly if you want to keep your marketshare. It's much easier to go after new technologies with more potential(like DVD recording)
Join the elite! Post at score:2! Ghostwheel is online.
LOL! Have any of the moderators actually read this piece? It should by moderated as funny, not interesting or informative!
Life's rule #44583: if it appears that something really, really stupid has been said/posted, check and re-check your assumptions about what is stupid, or your response is likely to be really, really stupid.
The reference here is to burning images -- as in pictures -- onto the CD.
Read the article before rushing to get fp next time.
He was talking about yamaha's exclusive T@2 feature. It actually burns visible graphics/text into the unused data portion of the cdr.
0xfeedface
Those images were overrated anyways. If you look closely, you could only burn images on areas WITHOUT data. Which means a pretty picture with 15 min of music? No thanks.
The only use I could see is if you had your portfolio / resume on there with maybe 100 megs filled, and the rest filled with the image. Still, no thanks.
Back in my freshman year of collegem my roommate and i both had the same yamaha burner 4x2x4. Mine stopped working and I sent it in to be fixed (for free). Then about 6 months later it stopped working again and yamaha wanted over $300 to replace the broken part. Very soon after, my roommates burner also stopped working. I expect a burner to last more than 1 year god damn it. good riddens!
Virtually all CD-ROM Burns will take make a CD from a file, as long as you have the right software. All the Burner software under Linux does, so does EasyCD Creator, and Nero under Windows.
:-)
Horrible grammar not withstanding, SOME of Yamaha's drives can burn GRAPHICAL images to the disc medium.
Any drive can do this..I bet it would be pretty easy to make a little program that took a bitmap and spit out an ISO of the right size with the right pattern of 1's and 0's. The trick would be getting cdrecord to burn it so the drive/OS don't try to read it.
Of course, they've probably patented the whole thing, but It's not that great anyway- it only works on the data-side of the disk, and only on the area left over after you burn your data.
As for labels on the non-media side, Sharpie seems to have cornered the market
How cheap are CD Burners? This week, OfficeMax ran a promotion where you buy a Cendyne 48x burner and a 100 pack of cd-r's, they would give you the burner free after 2 rebates. Yes, I know alot of people hate rebates, but $25 for a burner and 100 cd's is pretty cheap, and there can't be much in the way of profits in that. I regularly see retailers offering 48x burners for $10 to $20 after rebates. That's cheaper than retail on a CD-ROM.
I have blog like everyone else
Or are they just stopping to make hardware? (Yah yah, I'll read the actual article in a minute, okay?)
But I did want to say that I love Yamaha's actual CD-R's. The ones that are just silver and only have their logo really small in the center. They burn better than any other brand on my HP burner.
Or are Yamaha's discs just rebranded cheap stuff?
I only use Trogdor Burninator CD-RW drives...
I think the author meant that the Yamama burners will print a picture onto the disc itself. I don't think it has anything to do with putting JPGs onto a CD's filesystem, or turning an ISO into a CD-ROM.
The truth shall set your teeth free
I had a very bad experience with my Yamaha CD Burner. Basically, it never worked. I would get "Calibration Area Full" errors. I tried everything their paltry support pages recommended. Nothing worked. I even sent it back to them, but they sent it back after doing some routine maintenance and said it was working. Nope. Still didn't work. Their customer support was not helpful at all in resolving my problems. I didn't start trying to burn CDs until about 6 months after I bought the drive, so the 1 year warranty quickly ran out before I was able to get the thing fixed. I kept getting the runaround about sending it back in, or trying something else. Good riddance!
Do you mean that it can automatically not be fooled by copy-protected audio CDs?
>> Any drive can do this..
No. Drives 'burn' in one continuous run, modulating the laser to make the pits and gaps. T@2 actually shut the laser off and on as the disc spun.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
...the board voted to give themselves a 30% raise.
Furthermore, they said they would like to thank the RIAA and the MPAA for their support in this decision.
but then I don't want to unintentionally purjer myself.
You are not the customer.
But would a nicely burned label have improved on this picture?
I never liked my yamaha cdrw 2001ez burner (ide). I've had tons of buffer underruns and never got the protection to work right (I thought it was suppose to work automatically). In addition to that its terrible at ripping, sounding like a plane trying to take off yet sputtering at the end -- making tons of noise and not ripping very efficiently. At times it would freeze my entire computer. I've had multiple conifigurations and both windows xp and gentoo linux and neither seem to handle it any better. If anyone has advice about it please do but otherwise I'm trying to decide between getting a new burner or wait for the dvd rewriters come down in price.
"if it appears that something really, really stupid has been said/posted, check and re-check your assumptions about what is stupid"
That rule doesn't apply on Slashdot...here's a variation that does:
If it appears that something intelligent and insightful, without grammatical or puncuation errors has been posted on Slashdot, check and re-check the address of the page you are currently viewing.
Me again...note the misspelling of "punctuation", obviously my brain was helping me make the point when it caused me to leave out the 't'.
Well that explanes why I couldn't "burn" this file. All it would do is sit there, and look hot.
I've never had anything but problems with Yamaha burners I've encountered.
The future in in DVD[-+]R(W)s. This is where they will be able to make money, and I hope that they do enter this arena as they are, IMHO, one of the best (if not the best) makers of drives on the market. I also hope that someone brings something like their disc tatoo tech to DVD drives. While this seems like bad news, it's not all that suprising. Time goes on, new technology overtakes the old. It's digital evolution.
Look at me, I sound like a philosopher. He he he.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I've still got a lot of pr0n^H^H^H^H Data on floppy. What will I do if I can't read those? Dang. All my 5 1/4" disks are useless already. Don't take away my 3 1/2" disks too. Of course, the wireless keyboards aren't working too well. Starting to hear news reports of people unintentionally interfering with each other from thousands of yards away.
I mostly use my burner for burning audio cds, will my car cd player play anything else?
I mostly use my tape deck for recording audio tapes, will my car tape player play anything else?
There exist car MP3 players. Time to upgrade... again.
Will I retire or break 10K?
No, it was burn an image (text or otherwise) in the unused area on the data side of the disc. I seriously doubt that Yamaha could/would put in a second laser powerful enough to burn through the paint/ink on the top of the CD.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
"Does any other company make burners that can burn an image on the CD?"
Most certainly. Plextor, LiteOn, Philips, and TDK just to name a few.
#@$&^@#...
somehow I made the dumbass mistake of getting a Yamaha CD-RW that *wasn't* compatible with Mac OS X. Now my dear Blue G3 seems unable to boot from the latest OSX CDs. crud.
fortunately, it wasn't *that* big a waste of cash, and I can probably swap it with a buddy for a good drive. [grumbling none the less]
-- haaz.
thats a MESS admittedly. It depends on what scheme they use for copy protection, but a lot of the protection schemes used for audio disks prevent them from EVEN being played in any sort of computer cdrom or cd-rw drive. Some car stereo's cant even handle these schemes. If your a big music phile and want to make backups of your disks, the best way to go is get a stereo with a good digitial or optical out, run it into your sound card, record it as a wave file, then use your favorite mp3 codec ( i suggest lame naturally) for the backups. I'm just glad all the music i like (60's and 70's rock) is already out there, so audio copy protection for me is a mute point.
Of course, you just end up hitting Kazaa, and give the riaa fascists a giant middle finger anyways : )
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
All I have used are Yamaha burners. I think in 3 years I made one coaster. Now that I have an F1, I was looking forward to see how they could top this burner. I hope they don't get out of the market, I know there are people out there willing to pay more for a good burner. I guess my money will start going towards a Plextor. RIP Yamaha CD-RW's.
duplicate from days ago.
Does any other company make burners that can burn an image on the CD?
This feature, even if it worked well (I never actually tried it), was lame, as it made the image on the data side, so to get an image of any resaonable size, you have to give up much capacity. Also, only one of the 2 or 3 kinds of CD-Rs available made a really distinct image.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Image and File. :)
+5 Funniest post I've ever read on slashdot.
The webmaster there has an ENORMOUS mod file database, if he doesn't have it, he'll usually post a request.
You can also go into the terminal, locate the yamaha plugin, then just add your model, or use Hex Edit in OS 9 and replace with ResEdit.
Which is actually another possibility. You could ask ResExcellence to post a tutorial on how to mod a CDRplugin file.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
http://www.sunpowerusa.com/sanhelkittoa.html
I have a LG CED 8080-B.And i be a happy user of LG.Something else use the CD-RW of LG??What are your opinion about the product??I burner my CDS at 4X, but it burner until 24X.Best regards.But ive heard my buddies talk about the CD-RW Yamaha, and them like very,very much.Best regards. Blueice88
- Virtually all of the CD-RW's out there can burn any CD, regardless of copy protection, as long as you use the right software. None of them cause buffer underruns. And while they may not be better than a Plextor, they're not worse either.
Wrong. They ARE worse than Plextor. "Why?", you ask? Simple. EVERY CD burner makes little errors when burning (more so at high speeds.) Those errors are insignificant for your average geek; but if you're a producer/artist, it matters: you want your masters to be perfect. Plextor drives still have the lowest error margins.Modems - There's still far from a guarantee that you'll find a high speed connection everywhere you go, with your laptop. Modems are going to be around for quite awhile still.
Wired I/O devices - Hmmm. First of all, managing a compact office area, with lots of users in it, would be a nightmare if everyone was wireless. They work ok, if everyone's spread out. But in a very dense working environment, logistically, they would totally suck. And further more, while a wireless mouse *may* almost be worth the trouble. I don't see the point of a wireless keyboard, at all. It just doesn't move that much on a given day. And even if you did want to move around, how far can you get from the screen before you can't see what you're doing anyhow.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
You mean you can't look at it and see?
Moron, you aren't even smart enough to go to the right forum to find someone to do your homework for you.
I'd like to see a car MP3 player that exposes a secure FTP interface over 802.11*. Upload music while the car is in your garage, and then drive off with tunes.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I had a 4416S (I think it was) that would burn anything and was very reliable. I really liked that burner. Yamaha makes good CDRW drives it really is a shame.
Doesn't this all mean nothing in the end? I mean is Yamaha dropping the CD-RW drive line to move on to something better, or are they dropping out entirely? Isn't the current standard of CD-Burners kind of going to die when Mount Rainier takes off anyway?
It's starting to trickle in now, and when it finally gets a foot-hold CD-Authoring as we know it will no longer rely on proprietary packet-writing formats or cumbersom select and burn proceedures.
I for one have dispised the way CD-RWs have worked for a long time now. Mount Rainier should have been the stardard from the start, and by waiting for so long to establish a standard they (Sony, Philips, Microsoft, etc.) have only hurt the industry.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I can attest to those Lite-On burners. I got my 52x24x52x for less than $65 including tax and fedex, and it is simply the best CD burner I've ever owned. If you're in the market for an IDE drive, you can't beat the Lite-On 48x or 52x for price/performance. 24x re-write capability sounds great; I just haven't picked up any fast RW disks yet.
Some items of interest regarding these Lite-Ons (I don't work for them....really):
- Copy protected software CDs are handled well. Copy-protected audio CDs are not (as expected).
- Many (if not most or all) Sony, Memorex, and Cendyne IDE CD-RW drives are Lite-Ons that can be flashed to use the Lite-On firmware (to gain Mt. Rainier RW support, for example). They all share the same face plate if they are Lite-Ons - manual eject hole directly above the right side of the volume control. If you can get a good deal on any of them, you will be very happy with it. But Lite-Ons are typically even cheaper than these other brands, including after rebate deals.
- In Windows, CloneCD loves this drive, and if you buy Lite-On brand, it comes with Nero.
- Disk eject sounds noisy, but that's because the mechanism is gear-driven, not belt-driven. Disk writing is mostly quiet.
- It only has a 2MB buffer, whereas other drives have 4MB and 8MB buffers now. Not too bad, especially if your burning software can take advantage of Smart-Burn, like Nero.
Lite-On seems to be pushing Plextor around these days, especially when IDE Plextors are about $40 more expensive and are not as accurate as the Lite-Ons. I'm not surprised that Yamaha is backing away from this market, when good drives are getting so cheap as to be unprofitable for upscale manufacturers. They will be missed for their super-fast and accurate SCSI RW "tattoo" drives, though.
Any Tech Geek worth his salt burns his OWN CDs with a modified laser pointer, some chewing gum, a lighter, and Duct Tape.
The good ones don't even need the CD.
Amateurs.
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
Maybe they are dropping the production of CD-R/RW disks, not CD-R/RW drives.
It takes about 45 sec to create do a mkisofs and burn a 45 meg image. It takes 6 min's to burn a text around the outside of the cd. The text is so fate you can bearly read it. -Flyondawall
Floppies are commodity items. Yeah, you can buy them for free (AR). Monitors are cheaper than LCD.
If you do any system administration at all, then you are still using floppies. With a proper boot floppy, you can make OTHER boot floppies. I still don't see and CD boot disks in circulation that can do this quickly and easily.
CRTs, dead? Whatever. I don't see everyone throwing them out in a rush for LCDs. A few businesses are buying them for cramped quarters (such as front desks), but other than that I don't see them anywhere. None of my gamer friends use them, they don't look as good. Schools can't afford to just drop their investment in CRTs to replace them with the newest thing. Ask any graphic designer with a monitor 21"+ if they want to trade one in for a more expensive, smaller, lower quality LCD.
Methinks you are a tool of the bleeding edge. Just because new tech comes out, doesn't make the old stuff irrelevant or any less usefull.
And someone else already covered this, but modems are not going anywhere. Ask anyone with a laptop if they use that modem. Not everyone has access to a network port wherever they go. Wireless may become the standard, but as it's popularity grows, it's available bandwidth per person will shrink.
I think this is Yamaha's reaction to a commodity market. I have always seen Yamaha's products as overpriced and not necessarily better. Good riddance. Yeah, the image writing drive looked cool, but I try to fill my discs to capacity as a rule. I usually get to within 100 megs of capacity, which doesn't leave much room for images.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
The headline should read "Yamaha to Eject From CD-R/RW Business".
-- HG Pennypacker, wealthy industrialist and philanthropist
Who cares if Plextor is the best? I can buy one Lite-On (mine has never burned a coaster either), a second Lite-On for backup (since it's not a Plextor) and I will STILL have $20 left over to buy lunch or something.
There is no money in it. Other companies like Fujitsu also pulled out of part of the industry - IE. IDE hard drives.
If you look at the HP line of laser printers I think you'll see they cheapened and cheapened them from the Laserjet III to the present models.
Then look at your consumer PC's and we see the same thing... cheaper and cheaper - but a few years ago they had 5 or more PCI slots - now we see 3 slots - but in a mini tower. haha.
Power supplies also are compromised.
How about warrenties on hard drives? The drives we bought 10 years ago would run for 150,000 hours MTBF = 17 years. I have hard drives that have been in use for 17 years. Seriously! I got a pair of maxtor 350 MB ESDI drives that started out in a VAX. They are still running.
Does anyone think that the drive they buy next year with a 1 year warrenty is going to still be functioning past 2015?
How about 2010?
If people want cheap I guess they get cheap. If they want quality I don't know where they need to go. Personally I'd rather pay more and get better quality.
Wasnt it Yamaha who came up with the burner that will burn images and text onto the front side of the cd as well? Innovative idea, too bad it probably wont take off now since its not gonna be produced anymore.
I absolutely loved the thing. It cost over $400 and blanks cost $10, but I loved the thing. I can't even imagine how many floppy disks that I didn't have to copy.
I was writing medical database software and distributing it, originally, on 18 floppies. What a pain that was. I still keep my old SCSI Yamaha 1x burner around, next to my Winchester 10 MB hard drive.
Old7
...unless you're the company that has the most important relationship with the customer.
That's Dell.
Dell should try DellElectronics.com and get into the home electronics/music stuff...
I bought a 16x (16-12x CAV) drive in 1999, and in 2000 their damn firmware update ruined it. The worst part is that Yamaha wouldnt honor their own warranty! I will never buy anything of Yamahas EVER again.
On the other hand I've heard great things about all Plextor's optical drives. I also have Pioneer DVD-ROMs.
...
you did it! distance accuracy! flog a dolphin!
HP got out of the CD RW business months ago for this very reason. They decided to concentrate on DVD where there are better margins. I wonder if Yamaha had better margins and stayed the course for a few months more. Real inquiring minds want to know, other minds want to no.
I have four computers....two of them are laptops. Only one doesn't have a modem. I travel internationally and I have not fired up a modem in over two years. 802.11b or 10/100 wired everywhere I go.
I work for one of the largest display manufs. in the world. I know where CRT's are headed, and when. Graphic designers are all over us for our 19 ~ 20" LCDs.
I use Mac, Linux and NT....every day. I have not touched a floppy in over a year. USB keychain or Compact Flash or CD-R.
100 megs free? I have over 300gb online...and that's just at home. I burn DVD backups when needed and use mobile trays for my small (10~20gb drives).
Gotta love their recorders (woodwind). Gotta love their 70s era rice burners, too. Hmmm, 2-stroke motor oil smoke smell. 250cc and 350cc. Forget their 80s monsters -- death machine on wheels.
HP was never really in the CD RW business. And for the time they were, they (for a stretch) used Philips crap drives that blew up faster than the $10 CD-ROM special from the corner computer shop.
:-)
HP is actually not in much business of making computer stuff at all. I would venture to guess that 90% of their computer stuff is OEMed. Just FYI...
They really (Compaq and HP) are trying their damndest to stop making _anything_, it seems to me. No more calculators, not much scientific equipment, constant attempts to destroy the Alpha processors, etc, etc. Anything you buy from Compaq or HP is a crapshoot. I'd say the only thing you can trust to be consistent is their service, but I'm pretty sure that's farmed out too.
Oh well...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Yamaha stepped into the market when Plextor was king, promising to lead the unwashed masses to Partial CAV heaven.
But Yamaha never really delivered, from a quality standpoint, and once everyone jumped on the Z-CLV bandwagon there was no chance. Today, Lite-On rules the market with cheap reliable CD burners. Anyone who can't beat them has to either move on the DVD recorders, or get out of the market altogether.
Even Plextor will succumb, soon enough. When you can buy reliable 48x CD writers for $50, even Plextor's cherished name cannot sell their overpriced burners.
Good riddance. I don't care who makes my floppy drive, I have a feeling in a few years I won't be caring who makes my CD-RW either.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Laserdisc CAV had one frame per revolution, you could actually see the structure of a frame in the metal. The best thing about CAV was perfect rock-solid smooth back and forward scan and slow-mo. We used to have endless hours of stoned fun turning light-saber duels into dance routines.
Can you believe that my 4x SCSI Yamaha is worth more on Ebay than the cost of a 48X ATAPI burner? Yamaha did something right :-)
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
That's because they know that in the future, inkjet cartridges will account for 100% of all revenue in the computer industry. All other hardware and software will be given away free of charge as promotional material to generate more sales of inkjet ink.
I was seriously contemplating getting their newest [and last] drive, the CRW-F1 as it promised excellent audio CD results [very low jitter, etc.]
That claim seems to be true, but luckily I did some research and found out that it can burn a maximum of only 67 minutes onto a CD, which is a shame as I have many albums that exceed that duration.
Obviously as it has been said, Yamaha cannot compete with the market. Their product is good, but not spectacular. If you are going to buy an expensive burner most likely Plextor will be the brand of choice. I have a Memorex 2x burner from back when they were 360 bucks. Still works. My Yamaha 4416 died after a year. My Yamaha 2100 which is rated for 16x only burns relaibly at 12x. It's hit or miss with companies products. Some division just dont make the grade. It's like buying sony computers because their TV's are good. Thank god their off the market. You'de probably have better luck with a rebranded cheapie.
Thinking (and wanting) the best -- Plextor, of course, I purchased a Plextor PlexWriter 16x12x40 drive, and it has been nothing but problems. The first month I had a CD jammed up inside it. I called Plextor and they said I would have to ship it to them and wait at least 6 weeks. Shipped the unit to them 3-day and got it back almost exactly 6 weeks later, and the very first (not joking here) CD I put in it jammed up again.
Well now I was pissed, so I opened up the drive myself to see what I could do and found the problem was a bent piece of plastic from the drive tray assembly. Fixed it -- apparently all they had done was remove the jammed CD and verify the drive could open and close, not caring if the problem occured when a CD was inserted.
Currenly the drive refuses to burn anything but very high quality media at around 8x speed, sometimes 10 but that's risking it. Also the drive tray jams up when ejecting requiring you to push it in.
Thankfully I bought Yamaha's latest drive and it has worked great. The image capability is nice for buring a circular artist - album to the very end of the CD. Has worked great and they will be missed, whereas I will never buy Plextor again.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
The only Yamaha hardware in my house are two SG-2000 and one SA-2100 guitars. They rock. The 2000s, in particular, are total monsters of rock Wall Of Distortion Marc Bolan T-Rex Bowie machines. The best Japanese guitars ever made.
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Lexx, destroy that post for me.
Thanks.
- Stan
Top, bottom, what's the difference. Except in BDSM.
MTBF is actually the mean time between non-age-related drive failures. For a drive to have a MTBF of 150000 hours means that if you took 150 drives and ran them for 1000 hours each, you would expect one drive failure.
The MTBF is not intended to indicate how long an individual drive is expected to last before failure -- for that, you need to look up the service life or (for the more cynical among us) the warranty length.
I hate one year drive warranties as much as you do, but MTBF has nothing to do with it.
Those bikes are OK for diesels. But the RD400 Daytona was Yamaha's finest moment.
Not that it was a match for the king of the two smokers, the Honda NS400.
As diesels go, I really liked the FZR400.. That thing handled so well it was almost boring to ride fast.
...but I never owned one, because the Plextors cost only about 75% as much as the Yamahas, and performed to within 93+% of them.
It's a shame they couldn't have cut their prices somehow.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Satellite broadband hopes to show that small town or metropolis, you'll be covered. Those lines you mention keep the planners employed, and that's why they talk about them so often. Once the net comes out of the sky, we can go back to smaller clusters, and not have to follow co-workers into the big city. Either that or we will cover the planet in people, and there won't be any distinction between burg and boomtown.
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Could the image serve as copy protection scheme?
I just ordered a Yamaha CRW-F1ZEM for my new, old Blue & White PowerMac G3 from Mac Connection. Argh. Now what the heck am I supposed to get? Is there another drive out there that has the same high-speeds and Mt. Rainier support? Disc Tattoo was going to be cool as well.
mbbac
I got the press release from Yamaha about this more than a week ago...
-- http://z80.org - all opinions, all the time --
I used to work as Futureshop and I bought one of the Yamaha 24x burners. The thing burnt out on me within half a year. Then I simply went back and got it exchanged for the 44x CRW-F1 under the extended warranty.
Now Yamaha is going to pull out of the CD-RW business, and I don't know what they will exchange my burner with if this one breaks! HOpefully I'll get a Yamaha DVD-burner if the price is below $300 dollars.
It hasn't been working since I reinstalled my Linux OS a year ago. Every once in a while I try to reconfigure it and test it, but no go.
It will burn a CD but I can't read it anywhere, and I've tried a dozen or two CD drives. I've tried half a dozen CDRW discs, some good brands.
Or, I get errors. It will do a test burn but fail a real burn.
I suppose it could be SCSI or other problems but it was working fine with the previous OS install and I configured it similarly.
The fan in the CDRW had been squealing and whining, maybe something heated up too much.
--
Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
Won't people basically be switching to DVD burners pretty soon?
OTOH I just got an awesome deal on a Yamaha CD-RW on ebay... my old burner died, and I wanted to put off spending the money. I like it; sure is a lot better than my old burner, being SCSI and all.
'nuff said. :)
:> (yeah, that lame old distro. ;-)
and I know Mike at ResExcellence, so that might work. funny, he's still running the ResExcellence web site on LinuxPPC!
-- haaz.
T'schéngt gehollef ze hun. T'as zwaar nach ëmmer een "optimizé pour Internet Explorer 5" Message do, mee wéinstens gët een awer elo nët méi blockéiert.
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