detail information

DiscT@2:

DiscT@2 (pronounced as 'disc tattoo') is a new innovation developed by Yamaha and it was first seen during the CeBit conference of this year. By precise tracking, rotation, laser intensity and positioning the Yamaha CRW-F1 drive is able to write images or text onto the unused outer portion of any CD-R disc. This technology does have some limitations such as:

• The disc has to be closed to add DiscT@2.
• DiscT@2 only works on the unused part of a CD-R. When the CD-R is full you can't add a 'tattoo'.
• Visibility of the tattoo varies greatly depending on the dye of the CD-R (Metal Azo works best).
• DiscT@2 doesn't work on CD-RW discs.

But nonetheless DiscT@2 can spice up your CD-Recordable discs and you have the option to give your discs a personal touch by adding some images or you can for instance just add the disc title to your compilation. The DiscT@2 technology can be used with Ahead's Nero Burning Rom. If you've selected the Yamaha CRW-F1 drive as writer you can choose DiscT@2 via 'Recorder, DiscT@2' or you can simply start a new compilation (close the wizard) and enable the option in the Misc tab as you can see from the picture on the right. The Nero DiscT@2 Editor will then be started and calculate the available disc space on the CD-R. You can then add graphics or text to the disc.

The editor has some build-in features to make it easier to add text to your disc. It needs some getting used to but once you get the hang of it the only limitation is your own imagination. Below you can see some discs that were 'tattooed'. For our tests we used CD-R discs with a dark blue dye (Metal Azo) to get the best results. When you use CD-R discs with a lighter dye the images will be hard to see. Unfortunately most CD-R discs nowadays use a lighter/green dye which doesn't work very well with DiscT@2. For those people thinking that coloured discs will work well with DiscT@2 we can quickly say this isn't so. Coloured discs (green, purple, pink, etc.) simply don't work at all.

Disc #1:

• Brand: MMORE
• Disc Type, Material: CD-R, Cyanine
• ATIP Lead-in: 97m 26s 40f
• Nominal Capacity: 656.69MB (74m 45s 00f)
• Disc Manufacturer maybe: Unknown

Let's start with an image where you can clearly see the data area and tattoo area on the disc:

Disc #2:

• Brand: Yamaha
• Disc Type, Material: CD-R, Cyanine
• ATIP Lead-in: 97m 34s 21f
• Nominal Capacity: 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f)
• Disc Manufacturer maybe: Verbatim (Metal AZO)

Now for the special DiscT@2 disc that was delivered with the Yamaha package. We burned some text to the disc together with some images (the well known sheep from CloneCD!):

           

Disc #3:

• Brand: Yamaha
• Disc Type, Material: CD-R, Cyanine
• ATIP Lead-in: 97m 28s 12f
• Nominal Capacity: 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f)
• Disc Manufacturer maybe: GigaStorage, MaxMax

And a final picture with some nice looking women just to show you that you can really add any kind of tattoo you want to. You can again also clearly see the data and tattoo part:

Writing DiscT@2 takes about 11 minutes for a complete CD. When you're writing only a small part of the CD-R this will of course take less time. As you can see from the images the results are quite good but like said before you must use the Metal Azo type discs or other discs with a dark blue dye. Other type discs simply don't work because of their lighter (or too dark) dye colour.

Write Method:

Next we will take a look at which writing methods the Yamaha uses to write CD-R's. We used Nero CD Speed to do a test write. Because the Yamaha CRW-F1 drive is one of the first drives supporting 'Ultra-Speed CD-RW' writing we also did a test write using the CD-ReWriteable media. Below you can see the produced graphs of both tests:

CD-Recordable:

CD-ReWriteable:

In the produced graphs you can see that the Yamaha CRW-F1 uses the full CAV method when writing a CD-Recordable disc and P(artial)-CAV when writing the ultra-speed CD-ReWriteable disc.

CD-R

In the left screenshot you see that the Yamaha CRW-F1 drive couldn't reach the 44X as claimed. It reaches a top write speed of 43.30X. This is because Yamaha, unlike other manufacturers, uses the 80 minute mark as an indication for the write speed. The Nero CD Speed test uses the 76 minute mark. The Yamaha CRW-F1 reaches an average speed of 32.96X.

CD-RW

When writing CD-RW media you can see from the right screenshot that ultra-speed in this case indeed means ultra fast writing. The Yamaha CRW-F1's CD-RW performance is even faster than normal writing with their previous model, the CRW3200E! The average CD-RW write speed was 23.81X. Finally we have faster re-write speeds!

Next up in our Yamaha CRW-F1 review, the data read tests.

Features

Data Read Tests