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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
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.
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.
>> 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.
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...)