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Hardware

Tom's Hardware Review of Yamaha CRW F1 124

Posted by michael from the spin-the-bottle dept.
Tremblay99 writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of the Yamaha CRW F1 CD burner. Not interested, you say? Well, it can burn images on the media side of a CD. While it's not the fastest burner around, it can do CD-RWs at 24x. Not bad at all."
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Tom's Hardware Review of Yamaha CRW F1 More

Tom's Hardware Review of Yamaha CRW F1

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  • Lovely. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BeNJ-GoS ( 592137 ) on Saturday September 28, 2002 @06:29AM (#4349449) Journal
    What will i do with a printed image on the media side?!? stick my CD KEY's on it???

  • Life of CDRs (Score:2, Insightful)

    by rastachops ( 543268 )
    Looks like this may extend the useful life of CDRs! Sounds all good to me.... Even though DVD writables are coming down in price they still cant match CDRs for compatibilty (as they are still arguing over the format for DVDs) and price.

  • Suppose DRM only limited SPEED... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Saturday September 28, 2002 @06:41AM (#4349469) Homepage
    I realize that neither side of the controversy is interested in a moderate or centrist view... but it does seem to me that IF you had digital restrictions management that allowed bit-for-bit digital copies and imposed no restrictions at all on what you could copy... but restricted copying SPEED to about 2X realtime... you'd have something very reasonable.

    (The point is to duplicate the sort of porous protection copyrights have always had, in which fair-use and casual personal copying is easy, but large-scale commercial piracy is difficult--and is based, not on technical mechanisms, but on the relationship between the value of the unauthorized copies and the cost and practicality of enforcement).

    Yes, yes, yes, I know, the DRM opponents (the side I'm on, mostly. I'm an EFF member, BTW. Are you?) would never trust that a DRM scheme, once in place, would ever be limited to ANYTHING reasonable. And I can think of various ways of evading the intent of the speed restriction.

    Just a thought.
    • Uh...so you've restricted burn speed...so what? What deterent is that to people who would want to copy stuff physically? How does it help? Not to mention that that only covers physical burning (which I don't even really get how that would help/deter...please explain), and doesn't cover data on a HD. To me, what you're talking about isn't DRM, it's just...pestering *shrug*.
    • How would that do anything but annoy the home user?

      A commercial pirate would simply take the hour (at 2x speed) to make his own master from the original, then do his high-speed duplication from that master.

    • Large scale Pirates would laugh at your proposal... many of them here in Mexico (ok, maybe not the #1 pirate haven, but maybe #3) are still using 2x or 4x scsi burners...
      They just have loads of them working simultaneously

      You have a band and want to make a couple of hundred CDs for selling at your gigs?
      Here in Mexico City's "Computer Plaza" you can purchase a ready-made scsi tower of 4-12 burners that connects to your scsi-equipped pc for about 1000-2500 USD, depending on how many burners you want... The salesman will probably give you some 200 blank CD-Rs as a gift if you buy from him instead of the competitor across the corridor
  • We'll get to burn 3.09GB on the disk!

  • Images (Score:2, Informative)

    by SmlFreshwaterBuffalo ( 608664 )
    Unless I've completely confused myself, media images wouldn't be very useful on discs which are nearly, or completely, full of data, as the images themselves must come after the TOC.

    I rarely find myself burning a CD if it's only going to be a small amount of data, so that normally wouldn't leave much room left for the pretty pictures.

    But I guess it may be common to burn a few megs on a CD for some people.

    • Re:Images (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Technician ( 215283 )
      If you made coasters out of some CD's and don't have the heart to toss them, you could always put numbers along the edge and make inexpensive CD clocks for your friends and family ;-)
      • now there's a frivilous(sp?) project. I don't think we'd need a special CD burner to do this since most all cd's today have 1 bit color resolution. We just need the software to put the text down on the cd so it looks like text....or whatever( a clock ).

        I can see it now, the Gugenheim doing an art show called: "A Bit of CD Art". tm-LoB ;)

        There goes the blank cd supply out the window. Just like when AOL blankeded the earth with floppy disk in the mid 90's. It would be fun though.

        LoB

  • Obvious pr0n reference. (Score:3, Funny)

    by DarkHelmet ( 120004 ) <mark&seventhcycle,net> on Saturday September 28, 2002 @07:06AM (#4349517) Homepage
    Wow, graphical images depicting my archives of porn backups ON the CD itself.

    Either the industry has hit a new low, or I'm the only one planning to do this... That is until I posted it here on "perv"dot and all you people plan to follow suit.

  • Double sided CDs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Saturday September 28, 2002 @07:16AM (#4349539) Homepage
    Why have a 'media side' at all? Why not have data on both sides of a CD?
    • I'm not sure if it would be physically possible or not, but I'm fairly certain it would at least require the disk to be twice as thick, and would make the manufacturing process somewhat more difficult.

      Other than that, it makes sense to me, as long as they include a small label in the center saying which side is which.
      • but I'm fairly certain it would at least require the disk to be twice as thick, and would make the manufacturing process somewhat more difficult.

        Why would that be the case?

        Double-sided DVD's aren't any thicker then "regular" DVD's, are they?

      • But CDs are much thinner now than they used to be... flimsy little things, not chunky like in the good old days. So if they doubled the thickness it'd still be within the CD specifications, I expect.

    • Re:Double sided CDs (Score:2, Informative)

      by entrigant ( 233266 )
      Hmm.. I decided to reply instead of mod you down, but the media side IS the data side in this context.
      • well aren't you just the humanitarian

        Look mr. authority on everything that is multimedia. A double sided CD-R is very possible. The media side is not the data side of the cd. The Media side is where the label or tag of the CD goes, the data side is where the information is held, and reflected off of the media side. I hope to metamod your ass some day. In closing, if there's a double sided DVD then it's more than possible to have a double sided CD-R. Ass.

    • Re:Double sided CDs (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Blkdeath ( 530393 )
      Why have a 'media side' at all? Why not have data on both sides of a CD?
      Personally, I doubt I'd go for this completely, but in some cases I can see it being handy (just not on a large-scale basis). ie; I can't forsee something like that replacing single-sided discs.

      Double sided DVDs are great, sure, but consider quantity. How many DVDs does the average person have compared to the number of CDRs? With spindles of 50 selling for as low as $18, these things are as prolific as black ants at a barbecue. Personally, I've only got one spindle on the go (only had my burner for a few short months) and a small spattering of CD-RWs for backups, but I know people who have significantly less HDD space than I do (or more, but are more media-happy) who have everything conceivable on CD. Audio CDs, MP3 CDs, movies, games, files of varying sorts ...

      Long story short - collections of hundreds of generic CDR discs require some sort of organization. Since spindles don't come with jewel cases (duh!) you need a label, even if it's just with a Sharpie.

      So with double-sided discs, yeah, I can write twice the data, but how on Earth am I ever going to find it again? The eyestrain of reading labels written on the little bit of media that surrounds the hole would kill me (being the fine looking four-eyes that I am).

      Nope. Can't see them becoming mainstream unless we can come up with a label that's legible, long-lasting, and that standard CD-ROM lasers can penetrate.

      • I was thinking of CD boxed sets (especially places like Cheap Bytes). Any reduction in the price and shipping costs is worthwhile. I was pissed off that my Mandrake CDs didn't come in a nice holder, but maybe they had an excuse in that holders for eight or so CDs are hard to get hold of. It would have been handier and less bulky to ship four double-sided CDs.

        For your own burning... maybe you wouldn't want different things on both sides because of the labelling difficulties. But still, you could use part of the disk - say a 1cm band around the edge on one side - for labelling, and still have well over a gigabyte of storage per disk.

        IMO, anything that could have reduced the number of CDs currently stored in drawers and boxes is a good thing. And unlike switching to DVD, it doesn't require any new hardware (unless you count the five fingers used to pick up the disk and turn it over).

        Maybe you could also label the damn things just by having 'dead patches' on the CD where the ink goes. One byte of text on the label costs you 500 kilobytes in lost storage capacity :-).
  • Damn...

    Hey, the Yamaha R1 is very fast...why not review that? I'm sure you speed freaks you're gonna love a 170kg 1000cc bike
    • Personally I prefer a 250 kg, 1100 cc bike [gpz1100.com]. It doesn't burn CDs, but it's known to have left a few black marks on the road. :-)

    • Re:Yamaha R1? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Blkdeath ( 530393 )
      Hey, the Yamaha R1 is very fast...why not review that? I'm sure you speed freaks you're gonna love a 170kg 1000cc bike
      I'm becomming rather partial to the 1979 Yamaha XS11. Held the speed record until '84, or thereabouts, and it still soars past most moving objects on the road today.

      According to the owner (a friend of mine) when you're going about 150 in 5th, you can still give your wrist a twist and take off. Just be careful that she doesn't throw ya, 'cause she will. ;)

      </OFFTOPIC>

  • Problems (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zara2 ( 160595 ) on Saturday September 28, 2002 @08:05AM (#4349617)
    I am very suprised that this is not mentioned in the article but this technology is almost completely useless. The Disk T@2 can only be put on a area with no data. So maybe if you are copying 100MB of mp3's to a cd you could add a bit of text but if you burn more than 300MB or so there is not enough room to put the image. Personally I can't remember the last time I burned a disk with under 500mb on it so this is really a pretty useless feature, however cool I thought it would be at first before I did some research.

    • Re:Problems (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Captain Chad ( 102831 )
      Aside from the already-stated DRM and pr0n possibilities, I can see a use for this with promotional items. CD business cards, trial/AOL software, and (if you can do it on an audio disc) music singles.
      • It is my impression that anything done in larger volume is stamped rather than burned. Thus would the technology be useless for singles (other than demos perhaps) and pr0n because the producers would like a large circulation.

      • CD business cards

        Now that's an idea... IIRC the sides of those CD business cards (I'm talking about the extreme edges of the, more or less, rectangular shape of them) end up empty anyway, so why not use it for a company logo or something?

    • Re:Problems (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mmoncur ( 229199 )
      500 MB? Really? Virtually every disc I burn has 100MB or less on it. They're so cheap you can waste the space, and what better way to waste a bit of space than with a cute picture.

      More importantly, you would only lose 100-200MB to print a line of text around the border. A permanent label that identifies the contents of the CD at a glance and can't be changed. I can find uses for that.

      Most importantly of all, you could buy a pack of 25-cent generic CDRs, print little pine trees and snowmen on them, and use them as Xmas ornaments. Now *that's* a useful technology.
      • It's not so much a question of cost as it is one of manageability. If you're burning something to give to a friend or to transfer between non-networked computers it isn't a big deal, but when burning for archival purposes, 100 MB CDs mean that you'll have 6-7 times as many discs to keep track of than you would if you consolidated your data into 600+ MB collections.
      • 500 MB? Really? Virtually every disc I burn has 100MB or less on it. They're so cheap you can waste the space, and what better way to waste a bit of space than with a cute picture.

        Well, they may be useful for you then. Most of the time I am burning a music CD (before you complain its live and legal), a Game CD (for LAN parties ect.) or, most of the time, a system image or back-up of downloaded files. All of the above applications for cd's will use more space then I could and still get a decent image. Now I am mostly going by the feature in Maximum PC magazine but they did some extensive tests on it and stated that to get a readable font on the cd you could put a maximum of about 400MB on a CD just to do labeling, let alone a full picture.

        Now the idea of the XMAS ornaments (alternately coasters or car mirror danglies) I really do like. Not sure if I could justify buying one of these for that purpose but when I shope for a burner the next time I might think about it.

      • you could buy a pack of 25-cent generic CDRs, print little pine trees and snowmen on them, and use them as Xmas ornaments.

        You could also buy a pack of 1-cent generic sheets of paper, print little pine trees and snowmen on them, and use them as Xmas ornaments.

        • "you could buy a pack of 25-cent generic CDRs, print little pine trees and snowmen on them, and use them as Xmas ornaments."

          'You could also buy a pack of 1-cent generic sheets of paper, print little pine trees and snowmen on them, and use them as Xmas ornaments.'

          But it wouldn't be sparkly or cool! Given the common $0.99 deals for 100 generic CDs, I think it might be cheaper than prints.
    • I dunno.... I burned the memtest86 ISO - a whopping 2MB. A pic on the rest of the disc (or maybe even just text) would have been pretty cool :)
    • Thanks. You just saved me $150.

      I sorta suspected it.
    • Actually, if you read the article, it gave a few uses of it, suck as putting a serial number imprinted directly on the CD media iteself instead of worring about the ink on the label fading (some ink-jet inks fade BADLY). It is very rare that recording artists fill up an entire 74 minute CD with music, so I can see them being very interested in playing with the T@2 feature to personalize their stuff. If you are an artist trying to get started, it may be something that will catch people's eye, as it is very unique and I'm sure many people have not seen anything like that before. Music artists LOVE to push the limits of art and technology. Hell, the first hybrid cd-rom I ever had was a Primus album (tales from the punchbowl) that had a data session with a macromedia director made application.

      My question is, if you gave a CD with this on it to a fabrication facility for distrobution, would they be able to reproduce that with the stamping hardware?

      • My question is, if you gave a CD with this on it to a fabrication facility for distrobution, would they be able to reproduce that with the stamping hardware?

        I am pretty sure they can, if they can make the glass master or whatever they use to press the pits into the CD.
      • Well, agian, if you have disks that don't use up the full space, more power too you. Enjoy your T@2 feature and have fun. For me, and for a lot of the rest of the burning community, being limited to even 500MB on a disk is unnacceptable when most stuff you download is 700MB.

        My question is, if you gave a CD with this on it to a fabrication facility for distrobution, would they be able to reproduce that with the stamping hardware?

        No you cannot. A CD-R uses a dye sublimation process to fake the cd drive into thinking that the pits are there. There is other technology out there to create a picture in a disk. My personal favorite example (and what I was hoping the T@2 technology could do) is the latest Aphex Twin album where the data side has a face in it. The actual data has a picture in it. Now that is cool. I believe there was a /. article about it a few months ago.

  • nifty! (Score:4, Funny)

    by G. W. Bush Junior ( 606245 ) on Saturday September 28, 2002 @08:06AM (#4349618) Journal
    For all I care the burner could suck... now you can make better looking coasters!
  • No body else seems to have mentioned that if you go to the info page once main link loads... you will see that is does cd RW ar 24X but does normal cd's at 40X... When i was looking at it and thought it was 24X12X40 or something like the 24's often are i thought it was quite cool but impractical.. However with a 40x24x?? it may be well worth theat extra feature... The real question is if it doest the image printing as it burns or after it burns. I remember reading when it first came out that it burnt between the tracks of the data to make the image does this mean that it takes as long extra as it would to burn the amount of data in that space??? Bascily what will the final burn time be after the 40x + image?
    • Make sure you find writable media rated at this speed though. One of my family members got a new Dell with a 24x burner, they thought it sucked because they kept making coasters every now and then. Turns out the media was rated for 12x/16x. A lot of the CD's came out fine, but burning at 40/48x on a 16x writable will probably make you a CD that holds your coffee cup better than your data.

      101 uses for a misburned CD... is there a book? - phorm

  • useful for *gasp* copy protection schemes? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lophophore ( 4087 ) on Saturday September 28, 2002 @08:25AM (#4349643) Homepage
    I can imagine some creative vendor using this technology to burn bar codes (or other non-standard data) of crypt keys on CDs. The software would then verify the key data existed and allow the protected content to be accessed.

  • just got one (Score:2, Informative)

    by squarefish ( 561836 )
    Last week and it's awesome. no buffer underrun errors or other problems and it's superfast. My last one was a budget burner and died after a little over a year. I went with the scsi version.
    Highly recommended!

  • Serial solution (Score:3, Insightful)

    by really_blurry ( 163189 ) on Saturday September 28, 2002 @09:19AM (#4349723)
    Finally, a permanent place to write down the serial!
  • Am I the only one who took several minutes to figure out that "DiscT@2" is "Disc Tattoo"?

    Guess my age is showing.
    • "Am I the only one who took several minutes to figure out that "DiscT@2" is "Disc Tattoo"?"

      No, I just figured it out also after coming back to the article 2 hours later.

      ~S
    • Am I the only one who took several minutes to figure out that "DiscT@2" is "Disc Tattoo"?

      Nope, I didn't figure that out until you said it, and I saw it on Slashdot some time back as well.

  • Useful use of this technology (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 28, 2002 @09:32AM (#4349749)
    If it allows you to burn pits and lands arbitarily, surely you could write data in analogue laserdisc format to CD-R?

    Think how useful it would be - commercials for local TV stations could be put on CD-R. I know you can do that with recordable DVD, or just using an MPEG stream on CD-R, but this would be cheap and cost effective, assuming that the local TV station had a laserdisc player.

    Admittedly you would only get about 10 minutes of laserdisc video on a standard CD-R, but it would be really cool :-).
  • So if I understand correctly, it can only use unused space on the disk to write this information, and it isn't included in the TOC. If I read the CD bit-by-bit, does this show up as garbage data? It sounds like this isn't a special laser or anything, just burning bits on the CD in specific spots.

    So if I do a bit-by-bit copy of a CD burned with an image on another computer using a CD burner with no such capability to create images on its own, will it also copy the image?

    Or am I completely wrong here? If I'm correct, it sounds like with the properly written drivers (or possibly firmware), you might be able to make other burners do this...
    • If you read Tom's article, you'll see that Yamaha's using special hardware to accomplish more gradations in albedo.
    • the software requires you to finalized the disc prior to burning images on the remaining space of the cd. while finalizing the disc the table of contents is last thing written. When you copy a cd it only copies where you have actual content- this information is provided by the table of contents. When you copy 300 mgs it's faster then when you copy an entire disc, even if you do a disc copy- the software knows there is only 300 mgs of data and copys only that. So, no the image will not be duplicated.

  • CDR technology has a regression... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 28, 2002 @09:36AM (#4349759)
    My chief problem with CDRs is that you can't use a hole punch to make the disk double-sided.

  • Yeah yeah ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by dsb3 ( 129585 ) on Saturday September 28, 2002 @09:47AM (#4349782) Homepage Journal
    Wake me up when I can burn data on the image side.
  • If you're burning a batch of CD's, 12 minutes to burn the image is a lot to add just to put a picture on the cd. Had I put together a birthday CD last weekend and had I burned 30 copies for the guests and had I used the image burner, it would have added six hours to the task. Seems a lot of time just to put a label on a CD.

  • My impressions (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dnight ( 153296 ) <dnight@lakkaCHEETAHdoo.com minus cat> on Saturday September 28, 2002 @10:23AM (#4349896)
    I just installed one of these drives last night.

    It's pretty fast, and the disk tattoo feature is really neat. I paid $180 at CDW for it. The grey(blue/whatever)scale gradients are sufficient to get a lot of detail. The Nero software will automatically thottle down the speed if the media can't handle the burn rate you select. Useful feature, imo.

    And yes, you can burn porn images. I have one disc burned with 7 boob pix around it that I plan to give to a friend and tell him it's a CD full of porn. ;)
    • And yes, you can burn porn images

      REALLY?
      You mean there's no special software that detects them and refuses the burn? hmm strange.

      </sarcasm>

      S
  • I don't even use my CD burner anymore. I only ever used it for music, and all that just goes on my iPod now.

  • Next time you post an article like this, you needs must have a clarification of the word "image". At first I was thinkin', `Okay, so it can burn .iso images to the media side of a CD... So? Isn't this what CD burner software generally does? Isn't this the whole point? Perhaps this is some strange usage of the word "media".'

    But it turned out to be an ambiguous usage of "image" as I have indicated. This isn't the first time we've had this problem here.

  • More than meets the eye (Score:5, Informative)

    by DeadBugs ( 546475 ) on Saturday September 28, 2002 @11:34AM (#4350119) Homepage
    True the image writing on the CD is mainly eye candy. But the other features that the CRW-F1 support are the reason I purchased one.

    * CAV 44X max CD-R recording
    * CAV* Ultra Speed 24X max CD-RW recording
    * CAV 44X CD reading
    * 44X max digital audio extraction
    * IDE interface
    * 8MB buffer memory
    * Safe Burn technology
    * Optimum Write Speed Control technology
    * New YDC132-V controller
    * Supports overburn
    * Supports blank CDs of 80, 90 and 99 minutes
    * Supports the DAO RAW mode
    * Mount Rainier-compatible
    * Advanced Audio Master Quality Recording technology
    * DiscT@2 technology
    * CD-RW Audio Track Edit
    * Ahead Nero Burning Rom 5.5 and InCD software
    Oh...And a cool blue LED
  • I've got a CRW-F1. Yes, the included software-- a version of Nero 5 which, incidentally, is too stupid to match the curvature of your text to the CD (you have to adjust it manually)-- does burn text and images to the unused portion of a CDR. Too bad that on most CDs the difference between the burned and unburned portion is so slight you'll have to hold the CD up to bright light at an angle to see anything. Yamaha includes a single CD-R with a deep blue dye layer that shows off the effect very well...but so far hasn't made these special CD-Rs available for purchase.

  • *hum* printed image you said... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by danalien ( 545655 ) on Saturday September 28, 2002 @01:18PM (#4350449) Homepage
    It just accured to me that these "printed images" on the rest of the free space could be used to copyprotect a cd; (now avalible ) for us plain-users *that is*.

    The images gets burned outside the TOC, so when you read (copy) the cd all other info outside the TOC gets left out.

    Add a little "protection app" to the cd, make the cd-rom[s] execute the app. Where the apps look "in a certian place" for the right bit burnt in the right places. [Don't forget that you most likely have to encode the data of the cd; so, that only the little app that gets executed upon insertion can read&decode the contet (only IF! it finds the right bits&bytes on the cd)].

    And Voul'a a copy protected cd.


    *hum* upon more thought, You could do this with a regular cdburner too *you just need someone (or yourself) to code the right app for this certian scheme :)*. Maybe someone will start a new opensource project *hehe*
  • There is a consumer model that burns faster than 44x?

    I've installed several of these in external cases at work, and they are awesome little drives. (Although the Yamaha site says nothing about a SCSI version, there is one, sort of. It is an IDE drive with a SCSI converter that plugs into the IDE connector). Works like a champ, and other than DiscT@2, it can burn a CD pretty damn quick.

  • yo *nix hippies (Score:3, Informative)

    by zdzichu ( 100333 ) on Saturday September 28, 2002 @01:44PM (#4350561) Homepage Journal
    cdrecord already supports this technology - browse documentation and search for discopts=, imagefile=. Be sure to prepare 3000x40 image first :)
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