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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?
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.
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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.
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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 $20 after rebates. That's cheaper than retail on a CD-ROM.
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Hell no! I use CDs largely for backups and shifting project trees to and from work. They are seldom more than 40-50% full. As there is never a permanent marker around when I want one, and as my handwriting is at best messy, I would love to be able to use this as a means of labelling CDs. If the tool could take the CD title and append the date and time, and image that onto the data side of the disk then that would be perfect.
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#@$&^@#...
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.
>It was in the box, sealed, and it worked. It just wouldn't burn onto any of the CDs I had (Memorex).
Yeah, Memorex, eh?
Memorex == OEM Ritek == Junk.
I've not yet met a burner that handles their media well. Maybe a laser cutter would do...
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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.
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I agree with you mostly, it was pretty much a gimmick.
The only thing I thought it would be useful for would be a business like the one I'm in. We routinely burn disks with 50 megs on them for customers and for demo purposes, and it would have been 'neat' to put a slick tattoo of our logo on them, and invest in a nice cd-printer to do the label sides. Be something slick to hand out at trade shows.
For home, I'd be more interested in a cheap, effective cd printer. Though I did have an old plotter that I jerry rigged to hold sharpies. It made some funky doodles on my unbranded CDs. Too bad it broke.
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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.
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.
It does matter. I don't know if you familiar with laser disks, but sometimes on shorter movies they would print the back side in constant angular velocity instead of the normal constant linear velocity that we are used to seeing.
Anyway, if you looked at side one it looked normal. With basically random 1's and 0's you are looking at a bunch of noise, especially when all of the bits are the same physical size. On the back sides of some of these disks you could see a spoke pattern to it. "Lines" would radiate out from the center. This is because it was mastered in CAV (a less expensive process but nets less data.) It is actually pretty cool, try to find some old laser disks and start looking at side B.
I wouldnt send software to a client on a MtR disk any sooner than I'd send it on a stack of floppies.
I understand your paranoia about Packet Writing, because most of it has sucked until now. But the whole point behind Mount Rainier is that it actually DOES what its supposed to, and as I understand it higher quality medias will suffer less packet failure, and the format will map out and not use back sectors so that data isn't lost as frequently.
There are many people wanting to see Mount Rainier replace the current CD file systems as there are people willing to see the floppy die forever! Once the Floppy is gone and done for, Mount Rainier will replace it and the CD-RW will be the new standard minimum storage medium. This will NOT be a bad thing by far.
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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.
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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.