zip drives didn't really bomb, I use them all the time to transfer stuff from school/work and back. But that's because they're internal for the most part now. The parallel port ones were terrible. But They're not as mainstream as they probably had hoped.
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--Dann
I am the Lowest Common Denominator, LCD!!!!
Yeh, I have three Zip Drives, one in my PC at work, one at Home and a USB external one I use on my laptop when out of the office.
Yeh, they could have done better, still think they should have replaced FDD's in all PC's and Laptops, but you could say the same about CDR's look how long it has taken for PC manufacturers to offer them in new machines. At least sony have started putting them in as standard in there top spec VAIO's.
I think I will just wait for the Writable DVD drives to come out (or at least come down in price), then I can get rid of my VCR
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"All you want from life is a nice woman and lots of money, the trouble is, when you have one, you hav'nt got the other."
Still gotta find a standard in DVD writables though. Plus who knows if every DVD player will play them. DVD-Ram is coming out within a year but it's currently incompatible with any other device except another dvd-ram drive. So it's pretty much a data backup device at this point. But you don't have to worry about $30 coasters since you can re-write to it. I think we're aways from making movies, at least cheaply. Try looking into VCDs for now. If you have a dvd player that supports cd-r's, you can write mpeg files to them in the right bitrate/frame size and they can be played on yout TV. http://www.vcdhelp.com/
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--Dann
I am the Lowest Common Denominator, LCD!!!!
I don't really see it taking off as much as some people think, for a few reasons:
Most importantly, the reason CD-R and CD-RW were and are so popular is because those discs could be taken and read in a standard CD-ROM drive, and in the case of audio discs, in a standard CD player.
These disc not only won't be able to be read by a standard CD player, but not by a standard CD-ROM drive either.
No one likes a proprietary format. Currently, Sony seems to be basing it's future on a bunch of proprietary formats. This is a good example, since no one except Sony is even considering making these drives. Sony's Memory Stick is another good example, in that they can only be used with other Sony devices.
The speeds are less than exceptional. The reason people are latching onto faster speed CD-RW drives are because they like the idea of being done with a disc in under 5 minutes. Now, by doubling the capacity, but taking a step back in both write and re-write speeds, they're just making the time it takes to complete a disc that much longer.
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The first item is paramount. Right out of the box, CD-R discs can be read in 99% of the CD-ROM drives out there. The fact that these disc cannot takes away the portability and convenience factors.
Without convenience, no one's going to want to use these drives. Without portability, it's nothing more than a low-capacity backup drive. Tapes are better for archiving large amounts of data anyway.
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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt, and then it's just hilarious."
Good points Diesel. Compatibility is key. If I were to make an audio CD compilation, but I could only play it in a CD-rom and not a standard cd player, then it would be useless (to me). You have no idea how frustrated I got trying to make a Video CD that played on my DVD player. The first one worked, but the rest gave an unreadable disc error. After looking a little deeper it turns out my player doesn't support cd-r's, so i have no idea why the first one worked in the first place. And now that I have a 10x writer, I can be off and running in only 7 minutes, which makes cd-rw not as appealing with their 2-4X write speeds. So hopefully someone will create some sort of dvd writable that either works in most dvd players, or maybe if there was a standard that dvd players started incorporating in anticipation for common use, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
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--Dann
I am the Lowest Common Denominator, LCD!!!!
Goshzilla> There seem to be a lot of misconceptions on your part, both about what's being discussed and about CD-R and CD-RW in general.
Hopefully, I can clarify some of those issues.
The issue isn't that you could make a compilation and ONLY be able to play it on a CD-ROM drive. You wouldn't even be able to do that with DD-R or DD-RW discs. For that, you would need to use CD-R media in a DD-RW drive, since standard CD-ROM drives are not capable of reading DD-R and DD-RW media.
So, in order for it to be portable, you would need to use the older, lower capacity media anyway, which is why I couldn't see any compelling reason to go to the new format. Basically, you'd only be able to read the discs on your PC, and someone else's PC if they also had a DD-RW drive. However, seeing as how Sony looks like they will be the only company making these drives, I doubt their use will be widespread enough that the discs will be conveniently portable to other people's machines.
On the issue of recording audio CDs, if you want to ensure that they will be able to be read on standard CD players, use CD-R media, since 95% of standard CD players are not capable of reading CD-RW media.
One thing you might want to try is recording an audio disc at 2x or 4x. It might work better in that CD player of yours.
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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt, and then it's just hilarious."
Sorry, I was talking mainly about how cd-r's work fine, so it would just be good is any future media would also work in most other drives. I don't know much about the DD discs, so I wasn't talking about them specifically. I've used cd-r's and cd-rw's a bit, so I know about the compatibility w/ them. I've seemed to have lost my train of thought.
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--Dann
I am the Lowest Common Denominator, LCD!!!!
