Burning Your Own

Multimedia Reporter, April, 1993

With write-your-own CD-ROM systems now in the price range of an office copier, analysts are predicting a whole-new desktop publishing revolution. Here in the North Bay a beachhead is being established by a new service bureau in San Rafael.

Media Masters will burn you a CD-R at your place or theirs for about $200, according to Andy Lilien, one of the partners in the new business. With a Philips CDD-521 recorder, and premastering software from Germany called Toast, he and partner Jon Stanger will be able to master discs with either an HFS (Macintosh) or ISO 9660 (Universal) directory. The software was recommended by a friend now operating a similar shop in London.

In San Franciso Jon Hornstein at Fearless Color has a JVC system, and says that writing ROMs is an increasingly important part of his color pre-press business. In addition to archiving graphic files he's doing more and more "one-offs" or prototypes of titles intended for mass distribution. Hornstein charges $250 for two identical copies of a disk.

Bob Bruce at Walnut Creek CDROM has a Philips recorder and Young Minds mastering system (which includes a separate box) that he bought for his own use, and says he's now also doing one or two one-offs a week.

Although most will play in any of the standard CD-ROM players, CD-R discs are different from mass produced CD-ROMs, which are molded and then coated with aluminum. Each CD-R disc is a custom edition made by copying data from a hard disk to a specially made blank disc. A high powered laser burns pits into a pregrooved 120-millimenter disc that is a sandwich of polycarbonate substrate, organic dye, and a gold reflective layer.

The half hour of hour required for this transfer and the $25-40 cost of the blank dictate that CDR will complement rather than replace mastering and replication. For mass production it's more cost efficient to use the multimillion dollar equipment developed to stamp out audio CD's. But for archiving, prototyping and limited editions the desktop approach is increasingly affordable. If prices continue to drop as they have in the last year we may all eventually have a recordable system on our own desks.

With prices starting under $5000 the CDD-521 Desktop CD recorder from Philips, also marketed by Meridian Data and Kodak, and Sony's CDW-900E represent the hardware currently available for desktop recording systems. Bundled with software from Optical Media, CD Gen, DataWare, or a hardware-software solution from Young Minds, a complete system can run from $8000 to 18,250. JVC s sells it's own integrated system for $12,800. Available in either Mac and PC versions, it's said to be extremely well designed and easy to use.