OSTA Specifies MultiPlay

DVD devices of every description must read CD-R discs. It’s been more than five years since I first delivered that simple message. The consumer electronics industry, however, has yet to take it to heart.

Floppy Disk Replacement – CD-R or CD-RW?

By incorporating CD-RW support directly into future operating systems, Philips, Sony, Compaq, and Microsoft have unilaterally declared CD-RW to be the replacement for the floppy disk. They call it “Mt. Rainier.” What others may call it is another matter — maybe high-handed? Or arrogant? It’s like declaring darkness the industry standard if you aren’t smart …

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Copy Protection for CD and DVD Duplication Systems

As CD-R duplication and production systems take on a greater role in software publishing, they, too, must incorporate copy protection capabilities for CD-R to reach its full business potential.

CD-R Duplication Consolidation – A Step In The Right Direction

Now that initial easy sales are a thing of the past, reality has settled in for small manufacturers of CD-R duplication systems. Future industry growth now depends upon exploiting new markets and applications. To take advantage of untapped opportunities, industry consolidation is necessary, and is, in fact, already happening.

The Need For An Industrial Color CD-R Printer

Lately, it seems every time I go to an industry trade show I come away disappointed – not that I don’t find the event useful and not that I don’t enjoy chatting with the vendors – my problem is that another opportunity has gone by without someone introducing what I consider to be the next …

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Get the Picture: Digital Cameras and CD-R Need Each Other

Conventional photographs, properly kept, can survive for a hundred years, but where’s the digital photo storage equivalent? Storing photos on expensive flash memory cards won’t preserve them forever, nor will dumping them onto volatile hard drives, corruptible magnetic tape, or floppy disks. Surely universally readable, durable, reliable, portable, and embarrassingly inexpensive CD-R media makes a …

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Iomega’s Clik! and the Realities of Portable Storage

With the tremendous growth in the type and number of handheld digital devices being introduced into the market, an urgent need has emerged for small form-factor removable storage devices and media.

Computer CD Music Recorders

CD recorders are selling like hotcakes, but despite this overwhelming success, several companies feel they can reach an untapped market by promoting recorders as consumer audio products rather than as removable storage devices, which incidentally happen to have audio capabilities.

Storage Is A Many Splendored Thing

From time to time we all may be guilty of a single-minded devotion to one or another storage format – be it DVD-RAM, CD-R, hard disk, tape or whatever. Such was the message underlying the 1999 Technology and Manufacturing Conference of the International Recording Media Association (IRMA), held in Scottsdale, AZ – that we shouldn’t …

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The “Osborning” of Rewritable DVD

Successfully marketing new optical storage products is difficult at the best of times, so why do manufacturers insist on making it harder than it has to be? Such is the case with rewritable DVD (DVD-RAM and DVD+RW) where the industry has proven itself to be its own worst enemy by announcing higher capacity next generation …

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