You're invited to a sneak preview of CD recorders. They're faster, cheaper - and better than ever. "It's gonna be a ***** year!" - Penny Lunt
For $500 or a bit more, a CD recorder lets you cut your very own CD filled with about 650 megs of images, reports, Counting Crows songs and virtually anything else you want. No other storage device beats that.
CD recorders are getting close to that magical price point -- $299 -- at which PC users will buy peripherals for the heck of it. They should be a runaway hit in 1997. Then, like an aging movie star, they'll have to step aside and make way for the new ingenues, CD-Rewritable (CD-RW) and Digital Videodisc (DVD).
In 1995, users bought 800,000 CD recorders. In 1996, about 1.5 million recorders shipped. The 1997 forecast is 2.2 million units.
PC manufacturers have begun shipping their elite models with CD recorders preinstalled. Gateway 2000 (Sioux City, SD 605-232-2000) has packaged a Panasonic (Secaucus, NJ 201-348-7000) CD recorder into their P5-200XL PC. Micron (Norwood, MA 617-762-5045) is putting a Philips (San Jose, CA 408-453-5129) recorder in a new PC. Others are thinking about it.
CD recorders have gotten more reliable and easier to use. "You no longer have to get embroiled in the intricacies of premastering data," says Jack Berry, president of Image Management Systems (New York, NY 212-741-8765).
"A year or two ago, it was a pain to cut a CD," he says. "You had to have three engineers standing by. There were questions like, ýwill this software let me do multisession?' These have become nonissues."
CD-RW Ready To Take Over
Ironically though, CD recorders are coming into their own just as manufacturers are insisting they will really, truly have CD- Rewritable (compact discs and recorders that let you write and then rewrite what you've recorded, after a defragmentation process that can take up to five hours). DVD products should also become available this year.
We've heard these promises several times in the past couple of years, but this time it seems close to coming true. CD-RW recorders are due out this quarter. DVD recorders are expected in 1999.
Everyone agrees that DVD will eventually become the star of storage and CD-R will become a has-been, with possible appearances on Murder She Wrote. In the meantime, if the computing public decides it prefers writing on CDs that can be rewritten over recording on write-once CDs, CD recorders will be out of business. That's because the CD recorder you buy today won't read the CD-RW and DVD discs of the future. (The CD-RW and DVD drives may be able to read CD-R discs, with multiread technology and dual-laser heads.)
Should you buy a CD recorder today that will be obsolete three years from now?
If you really need to archive or distribute data that people can look at without special equipment, the answer is yes. "It's what you need to do today versus what you'll need to do tomorrow," says Alex Grossman, MicroNet's (Irvine, CA 714-453-6000) marketing vice-president. "You could have said two years ago that the price of CD recorders would come down, so why buy one for $3,000 today when you can get it for $1,500 two years from now? But the real question is, what does your business have to do today? The data may not be able to wait to be archived in two years. Will CD-R technology work two years from now? Yes."
Here are some other arguments in favor of CD-R:
1. A lot of other pieces of computer equipment you buy today will be obsolete in three years, too.
2. At $500 to $1,200, a CD recorder is not a huge investment to make, especially since it will serve you well for three years.
3. CD-R is much more portable than CD-RW. A CD recorder writes discs that can be read by any of the 140 million CD players in this world. CD-RW can't be read by any kind of device at the moment.
4. For certain functions, you don't want erasability. For example, legal, banking and medical records are better off if no one can play with them.
"Our customers don't ask for rewritability because they focus on archival," says Gary Brach, president of Smart Storage (Andover, MA 508-623-3300). "They're taking paper, film and CAD files and keeping them on disc. One business community is interested in read/write technology, but that community is using MO. CD-RW will have to beat that."
5. CD-R discs, at around $6 apiece, are much cheaper than DVD discs, which will start around $25. The CD-RW hardware and discs are also likely to cost more than CD-R technology.
6. Only Ricoh and Mitsubishi have promised to make CD-RW media. They can only make so much.
Of course, CD-R is going through its own shortage. Ron Baker, a Kodak (Rochester, NY 716-724-4000) product manager, the largest manufacturer of CD-R discs in the world, doesn't like the word "shortage." "We continue to invest in media manufacturing," says Baker. "The world should know they can go ahead and add CD recording into their systems and the media will be there." How many discs Kodak makes now and how many they will produce in the future is a mystery. It could turn into a murder mystery. "If I told you, I would literally have to shoot myself," he says.
Hugh Bennett, president of systems integrator Forget Me Not (London, CN 519-474-3466), expects the shortage to end by the second quarter of this year.
7. CD-RW recorders will be able to record no faster than 2X for a long time. (CD-R recorders can record as fast as 6X.)
CD recorder manufacturers promise to stay faithful to the technology. "We don't believe CD-R is going to go away because of the number of CD-ROM players out there," says Baker.
"None of those players will be able to read DVD discs. There's excitement around DVD, but it hasn't happened yet.
"We're investing in both technologies." He expects early DVD drives to read CDs and DVD discs.
Save Or Ship Your Images on CDs
Users of imaging equipment have three reasons to use CD recorders.
One is to archive data that cannot be changed. For example, large drawings for government projects, legal documents and bank records are archived onto CD-R discs. CD-R is a cheap storage solution. It costs about six cents a meg.
The second is to distribute data or software. Software developers send out their beta versions of programs on CDs. Not only are CDs a convenient way to send out software, it's also quicker and easier to install software from one CD than multiple floppies. Some publishing companies send page files that include scanned photos and other images to their printers on CD-R discs instead of more- expensive and less-roomy SyQuest cartridges.
Large corporations prefer to get certain types of information on compact disc versus paper. "Kodak used to get a phone bill from MCI that came in on a tractor trailer," says Baker. "Kodak has about 100,000 people all over the world who each have their own phone. Imagine the economies of scale of delivering that phone bill on CD rather than on paper. Then the customer gets data they can pour into spreadsheets and use to make reports."
The third is to create multimedia presentations. Video clips, photo images, drawings and text files can all be transferred to a CD-R disc and used to impress clients. Now that you've decided you need a CD recorder, the question becomes, which one?
To some degree, CD recorders are interchangable. Any one you buy will work, except maybe the one you get from a "drive scalper" on the street for $5. Thanks to the ISO 9660 standard format for files and directories on a CD-ROM and Part II of the Orange Book (the CD-R specs written by Philips and Sony that all manufacturers follow), the CD you create on any CD recorder will work on any CD player.
In fact, CD recorders are so similar in design that most manufacturers don't bother building their own. They repackage a mechanism developed by JVC, Kodak, Panasonic, Philips, Ricoh, Sony, TEAC or Yamaha. They add software, an adapter and other extras to distinguish their products from the competition.
Some basic things to look for in CD recorders are recording speed, playing speed and buffer size.
X Marks the Speed
The biggest difference between CD recorders is recording speed.
Double-speed, or 2X, is the most common. A 2X recorder fills two CDs in a little over an hour, about 37 minutes per CD.
It writes 300 KB per second to the blank CD-R disc. Double-speed is the only speed sanctioned by the Orange Book for now. The Orange Book Study Group is looking at higher-speed recording issues and will soon recommend specs for 4X and beyond. The next speed is 4X recorders, which write four CDs an hour, sending 600 KB/s to the CD-R disc.
Kodak is the only company making 6X recorders (which record 900 KB/s).
The only machines that record onto CDs faster than the Kodak system are duplicators. When you need hundreds, thousands or millions of identical CDs -- for example, Mariah Carey's latest release -- you stamp them out (or more likely, have someone else do it for you) on a duplicator.
CD recorders can't work faster than 6X because today's CD-R media uses an organic dye that has to be under the laser a certain amount of time to burn pits effectively. The media can't successfully take down information while being spun faster than 6X. For faster CD recording, CD-R media manufacturers would need to develop a new recording substance.
How to choose a speed? Consider these factors:
1. Price. As you can imagine, 2X recorders are the least expensive and 6X the most expensive. Prices of 2X and 4X machines are dropping, though, and they may come closer together.
2. Quality. You get the best-quality recorded discs with the Kodak 6X system. The next-best CDs will be produced at 2X, then 4X, because it's the newest technology and it hasn't yet been optimized.
3. Volume. For the casual user, 2X recording is fine. If you want to save a few files on a CD occasionally or at the end of the day, you might not even notice a difference in speed between a 2X and a 4X recorder. If it takes four minutes to transfer an image at 2X versus two minutes in 4X, you could spend that two minutes opening your mail or reorganizing your desk without any great loss in productivity.
On the other hand, if your business depends on your ability to record and distribute data quickly via CDs, you need 4X or 6X recorders.
4. System requirements. If you're going to have to upgrade your system so that the CD recorder can perform at its rated speed, you have to figure that cost into your overall picture. The faster you want to record, the more robust your system needs to be.
Double-speed recording only requires a PC with a 486 processor, at least eight megs of RAM, a fast hard drive (15 ms access time; it can be an IDE) and an ISA or ESA bus.
For quad-speed or 4X recording, realistically you need a Pentium-class PC at 90 or more MHz with 8-16 megs of memory, a PCI/SCSI controller and, if possible, an A/V-class one-gig hard drive, or at least one that doesn't thermally recalibrate. (Hard drives generate heat when they're working hard. As they generate heat, metal in the drive expands. This expansion can cause the drive's read/write head to lose track of the data it should be reading. Then the hard drive has to thermally recalibrate, which means it stops, finds the data, and then carries on. If you're recording at 4X and your hard drive thermally recalibrates, it's likely to cause buffer underrun, because 4X is interruption intolerant.)
The 6X Kodak recorder works best with a high-end NT, Mac or Unix workstation. VARs usually bundle a workstation with the system.
The overall trend is toward faster recorders. "We sell more 4X than 2X by more than two-to-one," says MicroNet's Grossman.
Guess What? You Need Read Speed, Too
Another distinguishing feature of CD recorders is the speed at which they read a file or play videos or games.
Playing speeds range from 2X to 6X, and they're rising. (Read speed is the second "X" on a CD recorder -- a 2X/4X recorder writes at double-speed and reads at quad-speed.)
To some people, the play speed of a CD recorder doesn't matter that much. For one thing, you might not even use your recorder for playing CDs. "You wouldn't want to tie up an expensive CD recorder by just playing it," says Dave Veilleux, Olympus Image Systems (Melville, NY 516-844-5000) marketing manager. Olympus makes recorders that read at 4X and 6X. "If there's a 2X/4X and a 2X/6X on a given date and they're about the same price, by all means get the 2X/6X. If the 2X/6X is $100 more and you're satisfied that the 2X/4X is a good unit, don't disallow the slower reading unit, because the play side will soon be out of date."
CD players have been speeding up and leaving CD recorders in their dust. The fastest CD player plays at 16X. The fastest CD recorder plays at 6X. It's unlikely that recorders will ever catch up.
On the other hand, "if you're looking at it from a systems integration point of view, it's nice to have a good reader and recorder on the same unit," says Bennett.
Another great thing about a CD recorder that reads fast is that it lets you install software from a CD quickly. If you want to copy data from a CD onto your hard drive, a 4X playing recorder can do it twice as fast as a 2X (provided you also have a fast hard drive).
A fast-playing CD recorder is for you if:
You don't have or expect to buy an independent CD player and will rely on the recorder every time you want to access a CD.
You want to be able to download large image files, such as scanned photos, from CDs.
You plan to play games or watch videos with your CD recorder. (Don't worry, we won't tell anyone.)
A slow-playing CD recorder is fine if you don't expect to do anything more ambitious with the playing side of your recorder than download small text files off CDs. (Or if you don't expect to play it at all.)
Baffled By Buffer Underrun?
CD recording demands that information pass from your hard drive to your CD recorder in an uninterrupted stream. If there's an interruption -- say your screen saver pops up, you get an incoming fax, your hard drive thermally recalibrates or another application distracts your hard drive by asking it to do something -- then the recording stops. A data buffer helps. It keeps feeding the recorder information when the hard drive stops. Typically, a one-meg buffer can save one second's worth of interruption and your disc may be fine.
If the buffer is inadequate or if, for some other reason, your recording session is profoundly disturbed, then your CD-R disc becomes a coaster. What's worse, it's a lousy coaster, because the water from your glass will go straight through the center hole onto your coffee table and stain it.
So you want to prevent buffer underrun. (Or get a glass coffee table.)
Bigger buffers are usually better. Manufacturers tend to offer one meg or less, because providing more sends the cost of the recorder way up. Even when the recorder appears to have one meg, you should check whether it's really one meg of "memory" or a one-meg "buffer." Sometimes the manufacturers quote the recorder's total memory capacity as buffer size. Some of that memory, probably half, is devoted to running the recorder itself, performing internal housekeeping chores.
Assuming the buffer is as large as the manufacturer claims it is, size isn't everything. "There are programming efficiencies," Bennett says. "There are ways to set up a 512KB buffer to solve problems better than a one-meg buffer can." The difference is in how well the firmware is written. A desirable type of firmware is called "flash firmware." This means it can be upgraded easily with software, rather than by having to swap a chip.
You're more likely to get buffer underrun when you record at 4X than when you record at 2X, according to Olympus' Veilleux. The company doesn't sell a 4X recorder for that reason. "4X recording is very hard on the host CPU and hard drive," he says.
The trend toward packet writing is good news on the buffer underrun front. Here, instead of writing in one long session that ties up your PC, you write in chunks small enough to fit in the buffer.
Packet writing is governed by software. The next generation of premastering software will comply with OSTA's CD-UDF standard for packet writing. Then you'll no longer be bewitched, bothered, bewildered -- and baffled -- by buffer underruns.
Another difference between CD recorders is how they load the CDs. Some use a tray, just like your CD player. Others use a caddy, which is a little case you use to hold the CD.
Caddies keep dust and dirt off your discs. They align the discs properly. They let you mount the disc drive vertically or horizontally.
Tray-loaded recorders give jukeboxes and duplication systems more flexibility.
High-Speed Units: What's Out There
If you need to record at six-speed, you're buying the Kodak PCD600. It's an extremely high-performing system. At $23,000, it better be. It costs 20 times more than its closest competitor. It burns a 74-minute CD in 12 minutes, including loading and unloading the disc and verifying the information. It comes with a two-meg buffer that you can upgrade to eight megs.
The PCD600 recognizes the barcode etched into each piece of Kodak Infoguard media. This gives you an audit trail for discs. It was used during the original OJ Simpson trial to identify photos of evidence.
When you combine the PCD600 with a disc transporter that automatically feeds the recorder with discs, you can fill the transporter with discs and leave for the day. When you come in the next morning, the system will have recorded your discs for you.
This system is used mostly in production environments like banking, software modeling and law offices, where the output quality has to be perfect. "It was designed during the early days of Photo CDs," says Kodak's Baker.
"You'd bring photos into a Kodak lab to be put on CDs. You'd bring the CD home, throw it in the back seat and little Johnny would handle it, get peanut butter and whatever else on it and you'd bring it back to the shop to put more photos on it. The recorder had to be able to recognize those flaws and make up for them. It had to be right and you needed consistent output."
When Photo CDs refused to become a national craze (although professional photographers still love the service), Kodak repackaged the system for corporate use. Oracle uses it to distribute custom software.
Rimage (Minneapolis, MN 612-944-8144) packages the PCD600 with Kodak's 75-disc transporter and Rimage's Perfect Image printer to make the Rimage Perfect Image CD-R Automated Publishing System. The whole thing comes to around $32,000.
The printer stamps labels on discs as they're produced, so you can't get them mixed up.
For example, a phone company sending itemized statements on CDs could use the online printer to make sure Taco Bell gets its own bill and not Pizza Hut's.
A printed label is better than a paper label because a paper label can get wrinkly and cause problems reading the disc. If you try to rip the paper label off for some reason, you can separate the disc and ruin it, according to Craig Hansen, Rimage's head of CD-R market development.
Rimage will offer this system with color printing. Who needs color printing on a CD? "There was a commercial that showed how fish use color to attract other fish, birds use color to attract birds, why shouldn't businesses use color to attract businesses?" Hansen says. "You want data to make a good impression. The first impression is the disc itself."
Young Minds (Redlands, CA 909-335-5780) resells the Kodak PCD600 with software for Unix systems. Their Mass Production System is $78,000, including a printer, transporter and controller. Building a data set for a 650-meg disc can take longer than cutting it (which takes about five minutes). To speed up the whole process, Young Minds puts two controllers in their system that hook up to the host system via SCSI. Each controller has a 1.2 gigabyte hard drive.
While the recorder is recording one disc, the controller that's not busy recording is building a data set for the next disc. You're cutting discs and creating data sets simultaneously so you don't have to pause between recording discs.
This system was designed for banking customers. Banks typically have a short window of time in which to digitize checks and put them on CDs. MPS can cut 100 different 650-meg discs, including quality checks, in 24 hours.
Double-Speed Recorders
Here are some of your 2X recorder choices:
Olympus Image Systems (Melville, NY 516-844-5000) is a price leader at the moment, with their $500 CD-R2x4. As you'd expect, it writes at 2X and reads at 4X. It has a one-meg buffer. It is plug-and-play with Windows 95 and NT. It comes with Corel's CD-Creator authoring software and Sony's CD-RFS software for incremental packet writing. It loads by caddy.
"People are used to handling CD-ROMs with less care because they know they can take it," says Michael Rubin, product manager. "By putting in a caddy, you force someone to handle it well. Also, with centrifugal force, the caddy keeps the disc as still as possible. Our next recorder will be a 2X/6X."
JVC's (Cypress, CA 714-527-7500) Personal Archiver Plus also sells for around $500. It's a 2X/4X recorder with a one-meg buffer. It comes with JVC's own CD authoring software and an Adaptec (Milpitas, CA 408-957-4535) 1510 adapter.
JVC's more upscale model, the $1,000 Personal Rommaker Plus, comes with disc management and testing features, including virtual or delayed CD-ROM emulation, which lets you know how successfully the disc will play. It lets users control where they put files on the disc. (Important and often-used files should go on the inner track of the CD, where they can be reached more quickly.)
Hewlett-Packard's (Cupertino, CA 408-725-8900) 4020i writes at 2X and reads at 4X. It's an internal recorder that comes bundled with Incat's Easy CD for HP. It uses an Alchemy search engine and a Photo CD viewer called Magic Lantern. It also comes with a SCSI board, two blank discs and manuals.
This month, HP is rolling out a faster-playing, SCSI version of its recorder, the SureStore CD Writer 6020. It plays at 6X rather than 4X. Both products have a one-meg buffer. They have autofocusing, so if there's dust on the disc, they focus beyond it. They work with Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows for Workgroups.
For those who want to put their multimedia presentations or Web sites on CDs, Smart and Friendly (Chatsworth, CA 818-772-8001) offers the $700 CD-R 2004/PRO MM.
This double-speed recorder and quad-speed reader is packaged with Macromedia's (San Francisco, CA 415-252-2000) Director 5. The software helps you design Web pages and 2D/3D graphics. The CD-R 2004/ PRO MM also comes with a SCSI-2 host adapter and CD-RFS packet writing software.
The Express Writer 2X/4X from Micro Design International (Winter Park, FL 407-677-8333) comes with a one-meg buffer. It's based on a Pinnacle Micro (Irvine, CA 714-789-3000) mechanism and sells for $1,300 to $1,700. It comes with MDI's Express Writer premastering software.
Buffer underrun is a thing of the past with Philips' EasyWriter 2X/6X recorder. They market this $700 recorder as a backup solution -- it comes with a 700-meg buffer. It also comes with Corel CD Creator mastering software and Seagate's Back-Up Exec file backup software. An external version for Mac users with a 68030 or higher CPU running System 7 or later includes Dantz (Orinda, CA 510-253-3000) back-up software and Astarte's (St Paul, MN 612-483-5338) Toast CD mastering software.
Ricoh's (San Jose, CA 408-432-8800) RO-1420C 2X/4X recorder also comes with a bigger buffer than most double-speed recorders -- two megs. Its engine is cooler than others (it uses a maximum of eight watts of power), so it has no fan. This makes it quiet -- a plus if you already have a noisy CPU. It can be mounted horizontally or vertically -- you can stand it on its side to save room on your desk or fit it into a jukebox or a duplicator. It caddy-loads to prevent dust from settling on your discs and to prevent you from getting your greasy fingerprints all over your discs. It uses a SCSI-2 interface.
Ricoh doesn't sell this machine directly. You can get it from Consan (Schaumberg, IL 847-519-1060), Turtle Beach (Freemont, CA 510-624-6200) and Microboards Technology (Chanhassen, MN 612-470-1848).
Microboards combines the RO-1420C with Elektroson's (Campbell, CA 408-371-4800) Gear premastering software in a package called PlayWrite 2040 ($700). The latest version of Gear provides cyclical double-buffering. That lets two identical, redundant buffers operate at the same time, providing extra protection. Gear also verifies the data it's written on the CD and tests the recorder to make sure it's working properly.
PlayWrite 2040 supports Windows 95, Windows NT, Macintosh and OS/2. For Sun and SGI users, Microboards packages HyCD from Creative Digital Research. You can pass the drive from one platform to another on a network. That's useful, for example, in a publishing company where some people are using Macs and others are using Windows.
The Afterburner 4240 is Plasmon's (Minneapolis, MN 612-946-4100) latest entry in the double-speed recorder/quad-speed player market. It's $700 and comes with Adaptec's Easy-CD Pro MM software. An $800 model includes an Adaptec SCSI card, a cable and multimedia software.
Pinnacle Micro's (Irvine, CA 714-789-3000) $800 Explorer 2X/4X system bundles Adaptec's Easy CD software for entry-level users. It has a one-meg buffer. At a slightly higher price, Pinnacle packages the recorder with the more-sophisticated Corel CD Creator 2.0 software. The Mac version comes with CD Burner 2.0.
Panasonic introduced their CD-Rtist in August. This $1,000 2X/4X recorder comes with Adaptec's AGA-1520 SCSI interface card and cables, audio cables, Adaptec's Easy CD Pro authoring software, installation software for Windows 95/3.1 and two CD-R discs. It also comes with Panasonic's Pana CD Magic software for running software and viewing files on CDs and Pana CD Handler for CD management. Its buffer is one meg.
For those who want to backup the files on their laptop while on the road or share a CD recorder with others, Portable Systems Solutions (Phoenix, AZ 602-437-9103) has the ShareStore CD-Recorder. This external device records at 2X and reads at 6X. Attach it to a laptop or desktop computer through a PortaSCSI (SCSI II) interface that plugs into a parallel port on your PC. The $1,150 recorder comes with two blank CD-R discs and Easy-CD software.
