[NEWS] - Yamaha Drops Out Of CD-R/RW Market

[CougTek]

Both SteveC and Mercutio sent me the same news, but since SteveC was 2 hours and a half quicker, he's the one who gets all the glamour and champagne (while Mercutio will fall into oblivion ;-) )

I saw this on /. Yamaha announced that they are dropping out of the CD-R/RW business by the end of March, citing a shrinking mid to high-end market they were going after with their CRW-F1 drive.

 

[honold]

allow me to quote myself from the sr post:

"damn! now i guess i'll have to buy a lite-on and then set some money on fire to feel like i've made a good purchase"

 

[Mercutio]

My father bought Yamaha's one of 1st consumer-grade CD-R drive in the mid-90s. The thing still works. That speaks volumes for Yamaha IMO.

There are a LOT of crappy CD-RW drives on the market. I guess it just got too hard to justify a top-class product and a top-class price when CD-RWs are becoming as cheap and ubiquitous as CD-ROMs and floppy drives.

Of course I've been buying and recommending Lite-On anyway. This despite my contrarian advocacy for SCSI optical drives and Yamaha's status as the singular (er, and Ricoh, too, IIRC) SCSI CD-RW manufacturer. Even I couldn't justify the cost for their high-end SCSI drives.

 

[SteveC]

Does anyone have any guesses on how long it'll take to see sub US$100 DVD-(+)RW drives? With the CD-RW market already saturated, manufacturers will likely try to make their money in the DVD market.

 

[honold]

i'll vote 1.5 years

 

[Mercutio]

I think it'll be a bit longer than that. DVD-ROM adoption hasn't been particularly fast or successful, and the companies that are attempting to make products for the most obvious application of a DVD burner are being sued out of existance.
Many people I meet have had a burner for a couple of years and can't figure out how to copy a CD.

In the end I think it'll be a marginal product for at least two or three years.

 

[NRG = mc²]

Hmm. Last Saturday I was enquiring at a shop about Yamaha's 44x drive - they only had the external firewire one, and that at a low price as well. So i asked how much the internal one was, out of curiosity. The guy said he's sold out and only the external ones remained, and that Yamaha is no longer making any optical drives.

I thought this was probably a B.S. excuse for not having it in stock, but was meaning to check up on it once I got home - I forgot to.

Oh well.

 

[Groltz]

Great....No further firmware updates, probably. :frowner:

 

[EdwardK]

My father bought Yamaha's one of 1st consumer-grade CD-R drive in the mid-90s. The thing still works. That speaks volumes for Yamaha IMO....

I also bought one of the 1st consumer-grade Yamaha CD-R for my lab in 1990. Goes to show my age :wink: It was built like a tank and I still have it running. Cost me about AUS$2500 excluding tax. Back then Easy CD Pro was so buggy I made so many coasters. In the end, I hooked up this Yamaha to an Apple Mac (thank goodness for built-in SCSI in these Macs) and burnt CDs using Astarte Toast (which is now Roxio's Toast).

It is sad Yamaha is going out of the CD-R/RW market. Might as well keep my old Yamaha to remind me of the good ole days

Cheers,
Edward

 

[Dïscfärm]

I also bought one of the 1st consumer-grade Yamaha CD-R for my lab in 1990. Goes to show my age :wink: It was built like a tank and I still have it running. Cost me about AUS$2500 excluding tax.

At work, we had the first-ever commercial model of a CD recorder available. It was a Yamaha-based recorder that came in a pair of small 12-U racks that had the recorder, various data interfaces, power supplies, and a couple of *very* expensive 320 MB SCSI hard drives for building the CD-R image on. This was around 1986 or '87. Later, around 1989, we had a Sony CD recorder. It was somewhat smaller, but it made a lot more coasters than the Yamaha ever did and it broke down twice. I don't believe the Yamaha CD-R even had a model number / model name!

It wasn't all that much later when the Yamaha CDR-102 came out, which was the first ever 2X recorder -- and relatively cheap at US$1200 as opposed to about US$30K and $25K for the first Yamaha and Sony recorders! I was still using that ancient CDR-102 at work in 1998, when I finally decided to send it to the "excess equipment" scrapyard and replace it with a new (then) Yamaha CDRW-4260S. The CDR-4260S (SCSI) has since been handed down to someone else. It still works! In its place I am using a Yamaha CRW-4416S that has recorded around almost 20 thousand CD-R discs. It still works! But the tray is getting a bit on the slow side. I may replace it in about 6 months with a Plextor 8/2/20 SCSI recorder that's currently in a CD-R duplication tower acting only as a reader.

Back then Easy CD Pro was so buggy I made so many coasters.

What else would you expect from a Corel product? Easy CD Cremator started off life with bug-riddled Corel Corporation. Corel Draw was (and probably still is) one of the most notoriously buggy pieces of well-known commercial PC software ever created. Easy CD Creator was just as bad if not worse from beginning to end when Corel owned it. Adaptec bought Corel and the intellectual property that came along with it -- and all the bugs and worms as well!