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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.
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.
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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."
Thats not what was meant. By "image" the writer meant a pattern on the surface of the disk itself. More info available here.
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.
Of course, tech geeks who really have a clue know that it doesn't matter anymore.
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.
Of course, if you include cost then they are better - about 1/2-1/4 the price. For the same stuff.
CD burners have pretty much reached the end of the road for development, and there's not much money to be made at these prices. My Liteon 52x costs about $55, and you can't spin a CD much faster than 52x without it disintegrating (that's 52x on the outer tracks which is about 24x on the inner tracks at the same rpm). Kenwood has made faster CDROM drives using multiple lasers to read, but noone's tried it with CD-Rs yet.
Logitech MX700. Drop the mouse in the base (also the receiver), and it charges the batteries in around 30 minutes. I get around 3-4 days on a full charge. And it doesn't lag, thanks to FastRF. I've got one, and its the best mouse I've ever owned. No more mouse cord snagging on everything.
"But any tech geek worth his salt knows Plextor is besto"
This was true 3-4 years ago when CD-R drives were less common and more expensive, but times have changed.
Lite-On makes some of the least expensive drives you can buy, yet they are top quality. They consistently beat Plextor and other expensive brands, not only in burning performance, but in ripping audio and reading data. Lite-On drives are one of the few brands that have a dead-on implementation of C2 Error detection, which is great for anyone who is serious about ripping their CDs to digital format. See Nero's Advanced DAE Error test results and you'll see Lite-on in 3 out of the 10 top spots. Not bad for a $48 48x CD-R drive.
And this probably the exact reason that Yamaha is backing out. They can match the quality or the price, but they can't match both.
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.
People don't know what/who to believe in on slashdot anymore.. So here is a link to CNet:
- 20192504-2.html?tag=rating
http://hwreviews.netscape.com/hardware/0-1095-405
By far, the Yamaha's most interesting feature is its DiscT@2 (or Disc Tattoo) Laser Labeling System, which lets you burn graphics and text, such as signatures, logos, or pictures, directly onto the unused portion of CD-Rs. For example, you could burn the words 2001 Holiday Season all the way around the edge of a CD-R containing family photos. You can use any CD-R media with DiscT@2, regardless of brand name or speed, but we found the text to be more visible on CD-Rs with a dark-blue dye. On the downside, the DiscT@2 software can be difficult to master, and the included manual provides little instruction.
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
Somebody more familiar with the issue can correct me if I'm wrong, but here goes my explanation.
Most CD drives today are rated according to their linear velocity. I think, not sure, that most CD drives spin at a constant angular velocity (RPM, rad/s); therefore, when you are near the center of the disc, the linear velocity is slower (lin_vel = radius * ang_vel, or something similar to this at least). Similarly, near the outer edges, the linear velocity is substantially larger.
In the good old days, most CD drives were rated according to their angular velocity. The CD always spun fastest when reading near the center of the disc and slowed down when reading the outer edges. You can only spin a disc so fast before it tears apart. (Some guys did an experiment to see how fast you can spin a CD before tearing apart; however, I forget the URL.) If I remember correctly, I think these drive maintain a more uniform transfer speed off the CD as well.
Or at least I believe that's correct.
Best thing to do is check XLR8yourmac (www.xlr8yourmac.com) and check the drive databases before you buy a CDRW/DVD-RW drive.
Go out and get sailing!
Your explanation is dead on, your nomenclature is reversed. Current CD drives are CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) while before they were CLV (Constant Linear Velocity).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Point 1: CD speed (both reading and writing) is measured in data/time. In this case it is measured in chunks of 150kb/s. That is to say that a 2x CD-ROM drive could read 300kilobytes per second.
Point 2: You make reference to this - angular velocity and linear velocity are going to be different based on where you are on the CD.
The outer tracks obviously hold more data - the track length is longer ("track length" probably not the technical term, but I am using it to mean how far it is around at a certain spot on the CD). Using our familiar Circumference = (2 * r * pi) formula, we can see that as the radius increases (the distance away from the center of the CD), the length of the track length increases, as well.
CDs store data as digital data stored in non-reflective pits on an otherwise reflective surface. These pits are a certain distance apart. This distance does not change as you get father out, and the size of the pits is a constant, as well.
Think about cars parked in a spiral pattern. The farther you get out from the middle, the more cars are in each loop.
So what does this mean for our CD-RW? Toward the middle of the CD, the CD is spinning at a certain constant rate. However, only so many pits are going by each second. For a 52x CD-RW, there are about (24) x (150kb) each second. As the laser moves out (since CDs burn from inside to the outside), the CD RPM stays the same, but now there are more pits flying by each second. Towards the outside, there are (52) x (150kb) each second.
So the angular velocity (RPMs) does not change that much while burning. The linear velocity, however (how many pits are going by) changes greatly, more than twice as much.
This is actually somewhat of an over-simplification, since modern CD-RWs use a mix of both CAV and CLV technologies.
Two (or three) interesting side notes: DVDs work using several more technologies, but the end result is the same. For one thing, the pits used in DVDs are much smaller, as are the tracks. This allows a lot more information to be stored on a single DVD. In addition, DVDs are capable of using multiple layers using different laser wavelengths. So when the DVD player changes layers, the laser changes wavelengths, allowing it to "ignore" the pits on the first layer and instead read the pits on the second layer.
In addition, DVD drives are measured using a different unit than CDs. At 150kb/s, a DVD would be an extremely fast CD drive reading off a DVD. A single layer DVD read at 1x is about 1.321 MB/s. More information about the speeds between CDs and DVDs can be found on the DVD FAQ
An interesting historical note: Laserdiscs could be found in both CLV and CAV formats. CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) discs came first, and had one frame per revolution (or maybe more, but there was a ratio between frames and revolutions). CLV (Constanst Linear Velocity) discs came later, and used a technology closer to CDs - allowing multiple frames per revolution, with the rate being based more on location on the disk. This allows for more information per disc (thus Laserdisc being called "CAV Standard" and "CLV Extended Play"
And hopefully this has been "more than you ever wanted to know about angular and linear velocity of optical discs."
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
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
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.