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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?
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.
..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.
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.
... 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?
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
>> 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?
I agree. I've had a couple of Plextors, and a couple of Yamahas. The Plextors have been better overall. Also, after the last Yamaha I bought I'll never buy one again. It was one of thier 16x burnders that sounds like a jet engine every time a disc spins up in it.
The only I must disagree with is the wired keyboards/mice. I will probably always prefer a corded mice/keyboard to a non-corded version primary for latency/security/lan party issues. Until the wireless versions become as secure as the corded version, I think they'll stay around for a while.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
modems
Except for the majority of the world who can't get any form of high speed access. But cell phones and landlines work just fine for low speed modems.
wired keyboards/mice
Except for the vast number of users who don't like replacing batteries in their keyboard/mouse, don't like the interference problems, and don't like the additional latency.
700~800mb CDs
Ok... I'll agree these are doomed to obscurity, but not for another 5 years or so. Maybe more. The DVD rewriteable market is still busy screwing itself due to a lack of standards. Until one clear standard comes about (or the various standards become irrelevant due to writer and reader interoperability) CD-R/RW is going to keep a huge chunk of the market.
analog displays
Except that CRT tubes still give far better blacks than any digital display, and do better than any current production method for color range, color accuracy, refresh, and half a dozen other things... yeah, I want my HDTV to be DLP/LCD/LCOS/D-ILA, but it has a lot less strenuous requirements than a monitor.
Exactly.. The parent was just saying that there would be no room for most of the cds he makes because usually he likes to fill them up with data, thus leaving no space for a physical image to be burned onto the media.
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
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.
This was my MAJOR concern too. I hope they will license the technology out.
It was a lot less time consuming and looked more professional to have the contents and a graphic (my logo) on a CD.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
- 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.Yeah they said 100mhz was as fast as a CPU could ever be clocked too.
I dont see why they couldnt have 2 lasers burning the front and back half of the disc simultaneosly, jumping up to 120x burning.
Thing is, if its burned in 2.5 minutes, is there really a market for 1.25 minute burning?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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
>> Isn't the current standard of CD-Burners kind of going to die when Mount Rainier takes off anyway?
Why? Mount ranier is just for drag-n-drop packetwriting to a CD-RW, I dont see how it will affect burning real filesystems on CD-Rs at all. Every packetwriting software I've tried (DirectCD, abCD, blahblaCD) has been slow and crappy.
OS-level support and faster burners will help, but CD-RWs still deteriorate pretty quickly when rewritten. This is the problem with all packetwriting software, the first 100 or so megs is where all the action takes place, and will wear out. Imagine a HDD that has sectors that go bad when they're rewritten only a few dozen times. This is what delayed standards, IMO; it's a stupid idea.
I wouldnt send software to a client on a MtR disk any sooner than I'd send it on a stack of floppies.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You've got that right. I've owned 2 plextors now (both IDE CD-R/w drives) and they were 100% solid with no problems ever. And I never found a copy protected CD which couldn't be properly ripped and then backed up with my drive.
One other good thing is that if you life in Europe and buy a Plextor burner, you'll get a copy of Nero, which is IMO one of the best burning programs out there. Too bad they ship the Roxio EasyCD crap in North America.
People who 'travel internationally' are people who generally don't leave big metropolitan districts.
Sure, there are 'civic planners' hoping to solve the 'sprawl' problem by forcing people to move into high density housing, but many of us are happy to know they're blowing air.
I'd certainly find some use in 700MB CDs filled with 650MB of data and a thin band of text around the outside mentioning what's on the CD. What a neat trick, and I'd never have to use my Sharpie ever again. (Never lose that CD key! Is that an 8 or a B? And so on...)