Introduction

Yamaha began over one hundred years ago when a young entrepreneur named Torakusu Yamaha set out to craft a high-quality reed organ. And as it grew, the company capitalized on a unique heritage of artisanship and technological know-how to diversify into an astoundingly wide range of products and services. Today, Yamaha is a leader in businesses ranging from musical instruments and audio & video products to information technology products, new media services, home furnishings, auto components, specialty metals, music education and resort facilities. In fact, the largest manufacturer of musical instruments worldwide also produced the first 1x-writing CD-RW drive in 1988 - and cost nearly US$10,000.

Yamaha's drives are well-known for their fast performance and quality writings. With the CRW-F1, Yamaha looks to be keeping in line with this tradition. This new 44/24/44 writer has the same level of performance and features we've come to expect from Yamaha since the 24x-writing CRW3200 model, along with new technologies and innovations never seen before in other non-Yamaha drives.

While the rest of the competition have already shipped 32x, 40x and/or 48x writing speeds, Yamaha kept their profile low after the release of their CRW3200 drive. The competition between vendors have been largely focused on writing speeds and such. But Yamaha bided its time and developed what they felt to be the "Ultimate Recorder" - firmly believing that speed is no longer an important factor in an already saturated CD-RW market.

The CRW-F1's LED turns purple and white in color when there is no disc. Insert a disc and it changes to bright blue.

Yamaha's opinion of an "Ultimate Recorder" appears in the form of the CRW-F1 CD-RW drive. This burner comes featured with 44x Full-CAV recording speeds as well as improved versions of the technologies seen in the CRW3200 (the Audio Master Quality Recording for instance). Perhaps the coolest factor of the CRW-F1 that got the "Oohs" and "Aahs" from everyone in our lab is Yamaha's new DiscT@2 (they call it "Disc Tattoo") technology. Basically, DiscT@2 technology allows you to write your own text and graphics to the unused portion of your CD. We'll explain in more details, as well as other new features over the next few pages.

A closer look at the drive's rear end.

Our sample unit was a June 2002 built drive.

The 24x Yamaha CD-RW media.

The review unit we received from Yamaha wasn't the retail version but a bare bone sample unit. Besides the bare drive, what we got were a CD containing Ahead Nero Burning ROM as well as a couple of test media instead. So let's take a look at the specifications of the drive before moving on.