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?

Comments

it's all about dvd's baby...

[goofballs]

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.

Re:it's all about dvd's baby...

[singularity]

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."

This was known for while

[Escher0]

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.

Found the link, its here: http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20020927/inde x.html

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."

Overrated images...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:beat goes on

[Zathrus]

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.

Re:I never liked Yamaha

[NoahsMyBro]

I've ranted about Yamaha on many web forums previously, so I'll be brief here.

In a nutshell, I bought a Yamaha SCSI CD-RW drive about 3 or 4 years ago for about $300. Within 2 months it died. For over a year Yamaha Tech Support (including Phone, Fax, & Email) absolutely, stubbornly insisted the problems were software-related, in spite of the fact that I had tried the drive with multiple software packages, on 3 different PCs running 3 different OSes.

Then, one day I worked up the energy to call them yet again for help. This time, with a record of my previous contacts right in front of him, a rep told me that "the burner certainly did seem to be broken, sorry, and oh yeah, it was out of warranty so he couldn't do anything for me. But in a few weeks there was going to be an unadvertised promotion whereby I could trade in my old unit for a discount on a brand-new one, so I should call back in a few weeks." He adamantly refused to let me speak to a supervisor, repeatedly claiming he was the top guy and there was nobody above him I could speak to.

Since then I've refused to knowingly buy anything from Yamaha (including a Ford SHO with a Yamaha-engine), and I've told anybody that will listen about this.

I only hope this is the start of a steady downfall for the crooks.

(Sorry, I tried to be brief, but got carried away...)

CD-R(W)s are Dead

[MBCook]

Let's face it, there isn't a future in CD-R(W)s. They are no longer the huge storage they used to be, and they cost so little that it's hard to make money on them. We've reached the maximum speed that we can without putting 12 lasers in each drive, etc. which wouldn't be cost effective.

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.

Re:I never liked Yamaha

[Chupa]

My first CD burner was a SCSI 4/4/16 Yamaha drive...failed in less than a year. I sent it back for warranty service after dealing with an extremely rude customer service rep. When I got it back, the drive tray would not open all the way and would instead jam. I opened it up and fixed the problem (bent support) and the drive worked after that. At least it did for another 6 months, whereupon it quit working again (basically would not burn CD-Rs that anything, including that drive, could read, regardless of the media quality).

So I decided it was time for a new drive. Being the retard I am, I spent $250 on another Yamaha SCSI CDRW drive, this time a 16/10/32 model. It's been about two years, and I once again regret my decision...although it is not as bad as the first drive, this one will not burn CDRs readable in other drives unless I do it with the absolute best media available and at a max speed of 8x.

About 8 months ago I got a Dell inspiron notebook that came with a TEAC 16/10/32 CDRW drive. This thing works perfectly, not a single problem. Now I do all my burning on it, leaving my expensive Yamaha crap aloneb.

So basically I also could care less that Yamaha has quit making CDRW drives. Good riddance.

This does not surprise me

[cdn-programmer]

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.