DiscT@2: Proof that it's better to be good than to be first
By Shoshana Berger
Business 2.0
Editor's note: Gizmos Weekly is produced by Business 2.0 and features gadget reviews and gift ideas
(Business 2.0) -- When I was told about a new external CD burner that lasers graphics right onto the disc surface, I thought it sounded too good to be true. Turns out it is. Yamaha claims to be the first to market with this DiscT@2 etching technology. (I kid you not, that's how the company's branding it. For those who can't figure out how to pronounce the product's name, that cheesy marketing image of a bare-shouldered hellcat getting her forearm inked should help.)
It's a Midas idea -- appealing to the garage band and homemade holiday CD cardmaker alike, but Yamaha would have done well to work out a few kinks in the labs before giving this spinner a full-blown record-release tour.
Hair-pulling experience
Though I eventually manage to copy and burn an audio disc with the Yamaha, it takes so much hair-pulling getting the bundled software to work that when I finally arrive at the part where you upload images to tattoo onto the "skin" of the CD (the underside, where the data is stored, not the top), they've already lost me. I'm not throwing egg at the actual burner -- it does its business quietly and quickly once the torch is lit. (It reads and rips at 44x speeds, keeping pace with the fastest drives on the market today.) The "Quick Start" manual, on the other hand, promises more than it delivers: It is woefully short-winded on how to use the Nero burning software required for PCs. I spend hours uploading music that then isn't properly saved to my hard drive and fails to write to the disc. And when I try it out on a Mac (Yamaha also bundles the popular Toast Lite program), the software works well, but the final T@2 looks more like a faint holograph than an etching. Is it supposed to be abstract art?
With the burner came a box of 10 DiscT@2ing optimized CDs that are covered in white logos and lines -- suggesting that Yamaha will be pushing proprietary discs rather than letting us use the so-rebated-they're-free variety.
I'm still keen on the etching concept, but since I missed out on the '90s tattooing trend already, I think I'll wait until the ink dries on this technology too.
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