Yamaha CD-RW Drive Writes Images In Substrate

johnny5 writes: "Yamaha has recently demonstrated a new CD-RW drive that can write images into the unused space on a CD-R disc after the data track is written. The technology, called DiscT@2(TM), is due out in Japan in July. The images print on to the CD at approximately 250dpi, making graphics as well as text possible. More info can be found at Yamaha's CD-RW site (in English) as well as at Akiba PC Hotline (in Japanese, with better pictures. Babelfish for suitably akward translation). No word on a timeframe for U.S. availability"

Re:This can be done now...

Assuming it is as you say it is not so easy. You need to insure that the writer will not barf. After all you feeding it with some data which according to the red book is garbage or pretty close to garbage. So the writer should allow turning off all error and sanity checks.

Alternatively it is very good software that merges an image on top of data that is acceptable to a normal CD writer.

In either case it is not just PI, elementary calculations and a bitmap.

Re:This can be done now...

The visibility of the burned track depends on the kind of substrate used on the particular CD blank. Green ones show up best. Pale yellow ones are often almost invisible.

Does this mean that the Yamaha drive will only be effective on green CDs, or does the laser use a different strength to burn the piccies?

Finally!!

No more losing my WaReZ cd keys!

Re:Finally!!

You can't do this on mass produced CDs for two reasons:

1) Mass produced CDs are pressed, not burned. So I don't even know if this process will work for a pressed CD which uses a different authoring process.

2) Even if this was possibile in that regard. Having a unique CD key pressed onto each CD would result in creating n templates (where n=number of cds pressed) which is too expensive to be useful. This is sorta the same reason as to why we see CD Keys on cd cases, but never printed onto the front label side of the cd.

Special logo for the RIAA

How about burning in something like 'Fuck you RIAA' onto every CD-R. That'd make them happy.

Hack

For anyone wondering what the word 'hack' actually means, THIS IS IT.

FINALLY

So not only can we make pirated CD's, we can now put copy protected images on them as well... you probably can't see it, but I'm doing a little dance for joy over here, knowing that I can piss off the RIAA even more

Next step, incorporating this wonderful gadget into your fridge/freezer/1970's jukebox

what will they think of next

Cute

Very cute, however for the home user this won't be a hit, unless it's reasonably priced. Otherwise most people will just stick with a perminant OHP pen and write on the CD. It's cheap and it works.

For smaller companies, now that is a different matter and something likw that would be rather neat and useful.

Plus, isn't the market moving more and more towards DVD burners? I have a 4x CD burner at the moment and when I upgrade i'll be looking more and more at a hybrid CDR/RW/DVD combination job and not a 32x CDRW with the ability to burn pictures on it.

Re:Cute

"For smaller companies, now that is a different matter and something likw that would be rather neat and useful."

Do not underestimate the 'gimmick marketing potential' of this idea. Let me explain:

I'm not talking about marketing this actual Yamaha drive. I am talking about using graphic-ized CDs as marketing tools in themselves to sell other products.

If a company wants to sell something and have their marketing materials stand out, the marketing materials must have some sort of neat quirk. This can be in the form of a keychain with a built in puzzle, those business card shaped CDs, or whatever. They're neat things. The first time I got a business card shaped CD (marketing from MSFT no less) I did not believe when someone told me it was a real disc so I put it in my machine, and played the marketing video on the CD. Lo and behold it worked. And I ended up watching their marketing video.

I think that CDs with graphics burned on the back of them would have similar appeal.

The names got weirder every Year

So its

the revolutionary DiscT@2TM Laser Labeling System,

pronounced as Disctatoo trademark LLS

How do normal people know how to pronouce this or non-english speaking people like me. In German it would be "DiskTatzwei" trademark LLS. So Marketing only focuses on the english speaking clientel or what ?

Re:The names got weirder every Year

pronounced as Disctatoo trademark LLS

Heh, I thought it was
Disc, Tea at 2:00
But yours makes more sense. :)

It´s a cool feature but...

is there any actual use for this? Id rather buy a drive that burns faster than one that prints images on my CDs. That thing must cost lots of money, and its not a actual new feature, I already saw some presentation CDs here in the company I work for with text printed but I believe those were done with MUCH professional (expensive) equipment.

Neat but

"The CRW-F1 is the first CD-RW recorder to offer the revolutionary DiscT@2TM Laser Labeling System, which allows graphics and text to be burnt onto CD-R disc, eliminating the need for labels. Customers can put graphics, such as signatures, logos, memorandums, and photo images onto CD-R's unused area after data writing. This unique feature will certainly enhance the CD-R recording experience for many users"

So it will only "draw" on unused parts of the disk, basically taking up space... crap.

You're wrong

"Customers can put graphics, such as signatures, logos, memorandums, and photo images onto CD-R's unused area after data writing."

Look closely: there is a very small data area (inner circle) on the picture, all other space is unused.

AOL's way ahead of them.

AOL stamped their logo by similar methods into a wave of CDs a while back.

I was keeping a few as extra-pretty coasters, but they were thrown out behind my back...

Whee

I was doing that 10 years ago with optical cards. You could print an image on the optical surface in a similar way as the CD-RW. Of course, you couldn't put any data on there...and the writers/readers cost $10k each...and they were SCSI only...

As easy as a floppy!

I like this text from the product info page:

Allows you to write, rewrite and backup data on CD as quickly and easily as you would on a floppy disk.

Yea! Yippee! Those floppies sure are quick! And with the amount of data loss I've seen, those floppies are easy, too! Someone should sit down with their marketing people and show them that most of us probably wouldn't interpret that sentence as a compliment to their product.

*Sigh*... gotta flip it to see the images

Unless I'm misreading this, the image only appears on the data side of the disc. And the last time I looked, even on a bare no-label CD, I couldn't see where the data ended from the label side.

I don't know about you, but I'd never label the data
side of my CD-R.

Whenever they figure out how to show it on the LABEL side, call me.

They do have the technology now!

Look! You can make your own front side labels on your computer! [amazon.com]

I know becuase I did a lot of research on this. I went to Best Buy and talked to their knowledgable staff and they told me this was the thing we needed. And they said it was "Sweet" so I had to get it. They also told be I should buy the extended warranty contract, so of course I did- you never know when some "new technology" is going to break and you won't be able to fix it.

Gimmick

So I can put graphics on the data side of the disc, though the more I put on the disc, the less space I have for my graphics.

Compare this to using something like a CD inkjet printer, where I have the whole of the top of the disc to use for color graphics, that I don't have to turn the disc over to see.

I can see the geek appeal, but I really don't see this as practical.

Combine this with that Aphex Twin graphic...

Ahhh cool non-musical tricks for music.

It would be cooler if someone would design a disk that could display a picture in the area where data is stored (perhaps store data on a lower level, like on double-density DVDs) so you could have art on the underside of a full-length album.

Frankly I think all of this is a little bit cheesy, and while cool every once in a while, would get old fast if put into general use.

Use rikai.com instead of Babelfish

Hi, those who want to understand more of the Japanese text should try Rikai's [rikai.com] free Japanese->English web reading tool. It fetches the Japanese page and inserts DHTML to provide information about the words, that simply pops up when the mouse hovers over an unknown word.

To read the page mentioned in the article simply cut-and-paste the URL.

More Pr0n

So, it means that now I can have a CD full of pr0n and still squeeze one more picture in by printing it in the media. Cool! :)

Digital's PDP-1 paper tape did it first!

Obligatory complaint: why, this is barely news at all; a very similar story was reported in Slashdot just a few decades ago, in 1961.

The PDP-1 used eight-channel punched paper tape as the predominant storage medium, punching at a speedy 60 characters per second and reading at an ungodly-fast 200 characters per second.

On program tapes, prior to the start of the actual binary program data, the assembler would punch a human-readable label in which the title was spelled out in human-readable format in the block letters made out of patterns of holes. IIRC a 5x7 matrix, a little ugly because a horizontal line of little feed holes ran through the center of the character which meant that not only did the characters look "overstruck," but the spacing between rows 3 and 4 was a little wider than the spacing between other rows.

I wonder what the earliest use of "kludging directly human-readable data into a medium that was intended only to be machine-readable?"

I seem to recall that IBM card decks had a couple of preamble cards in which the punches spelled out a code number in block letters.

I wonder if ISOs can be constructed to do this

I actualy thought of this several months ago, and even submited an ask slashdot (rejected of course...) to find out if it could be pulled off through specialy constructed ISOs. Anyone ever tried doing this?

Re:what's the point of this?

The "point" is that CD-R drives have become a commodity, and they're trying to stand out. Two years ago, I bought CD-R drives largely on brand, for the most part sticking with Yamaha and Plextor. It used to make a difference; I had cheap drives die on me after only a few hundred burns, whereas Plextor and Yamaha drives typically make it into the 10,000's.

However, for the last year or so, (at least, in my experience) a drive is a drive; they all work just fine and there's not much reason to get more than a $70 CompUSA-branded Sanyo or something. Yamaha and other higher-end manufacturers have had to cut prices drastically to remain competitive.

There are better and faster media being developed, but they're in the lab. When it comes time to develop a standard in the industry to utilize those media, I'm sure Yamaha will be at the table. In the mean time, they have to make money selling the product that's coming out the door now.

Having a drive that does something cool like this sets it apart and might make people spend an extra $20 for a Yamaha drive.

Re:Specifications Reqirements

The reason is that you will need some software to convert the bitmap into a writable image for the burner to work with. However, this is almost certainly going to be closed-source only endeveror, doing this open-sourced early in the ball game would only make it easier for competators to understand how exactly you are doing things, and possibly make a feature as good or better. You can of course burn all you want with your non-windows operating systems, but my guess is that you can only use the picture drawing tool in side of windows. This is like the case with some of my network cards that only state that they work with windows 9x and windows NT, but still work just fine in the various *NIX operating systems out there (worked with all the ones i got my hands on: FreeBSD, various flavors of Linux, and solaris).