What's new out there in the CD ROM world

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): One of my most treasured collections is Reader's Digest, which I've always bought and religiously read from cover to cover for over twenty years now. Like millions of other people around the world, most of us know about and can easily appreciate the inspiring stories about self-determination and courage that are featured in every issue.

However, the Reader's Digest Association is not totally about monthly magazines. When I was still a student living in Honolulu, I had a chance to buy heaps of boxed vinyl LPs from the association that I still have because they contain beautiful and rare musical pieces. When CDs came out, I began getting the magazine's offerings. If you ask me, among the best picks of my Reader's Digest music CD collection are 101 Glorious Melodies from Operetta and 120 Melodies that will live forever.

I had ordered two sets of self-education tapes and a number of reference books, including the American Medical Association's Home Medical Encyclopedia, which I once mentioned in this column. These are excellent products, and so I believe the people at their Pleasantville, New York, headquarters deserve heaps of accolades for their sagacity and sensitivity in selecting and repackaging high-quality materials for reading, listening and watching.

Now, in the CD ROM era, Reader's Digest has cleverly embraced the new medium in order to bring its excellent offerings to you. In cooperation with Microsoft, it is going to publish its references in multimedia CD format. Both Microsoft and the association will market the same products under their respective labels. More excellent reference materials will be arriving on CDs. Therefore, if you don't already have a CD drive on your PC, you'll miss out on more and more of good stuff.

CD in notebooks

Yes, the future of CD ROM is already here. As I reported to you, installing SmartSuite and Office by shuffling 25 to 30 floppy diskettes is no fun at all. On the other hand, installing CorelDRAW!, CorelFLOW!, or OS/2 Warp doesn't take a lot of time because you don't have to swap diskettes. Just insert the disc and you can do something else. We can expect that future software packages will come in CDs instead of diskettes.

And the price of CD ROM drives themselves have plunged. I remember having to pay US$700.00 for my first Sony CD drive. Now you could get a Mitsumi drive for US$ 89.00 through a mail order company in the U.S. (although I don't recommend you buy this one because it only has single-speed capability). You should be able to find a decent CD ROM drive locally for about Rp 700,000.

Even people on the road today don't seem to be able to work without a CD ROM drive. Formerly, the best they could have was a 3.5" CD ROM player built in the notebook, such as the CF-V21P model from Panasonic. More recently, they have been able to take along a much larger notebook with a full 5.25" CD ROM drive and built-in speakers, such as Texas Instrument's Travelmate 4000M (it's the one on the left in the accompanying illustration). The problem with the earlier version is that the 3.5" format -- although it can contain up to 250 MB of data -- is not a popular one. Not many are currently available, and I don't think there will ever be. The problem with the latter is, of course, that the notebook and its docking station become too bulky and too heavy.

Luckily, a new generation of CD-ROM notebooks has come from Panasonic, IBM and MPC. In the illustration, you can see the Panasonic's version, the V41, on the right. Underneath the key board, which you can raise, you'll find a CD drive. Next to it is a storage slot for an extra disc. The drive has double-speed capability, and the notebook comes with built-in 16-bit stereo sound board and a set of speakers. Panasonic throws in choice of muscular CPUs into the motherboard, including Intel DX4 100 MHz, in order to make sure that it is giving you a very fast machine to take on the road. And, for display, this model also has an active matrix screen with a palette of 65 thousand colors. Isn't that gorgeous?

MPC's CD ROM notebook looks similar to Panasonic's, but it doesn't have the storage space for the extra CD. A weak point is the fact that the motherboard is exposed each time you remove the CD from the drive.

IBM has a slightly different approach to stowing the disc. IBM's renown ThinkPads have been modular for the most part anyway, so what they've done is take out the floppy disk drive and put a double-speed CD drive into the case of ThinkPad 755CD. The neat thing about IBM's drive is that it comes with its own tray, which means that you don't have to lift up the keyboard or expose the motherboard to dust when you want to play a disc.

Unfortunately, all of these CD player notebooks share one big problem in common with your Discman: The batteries don't last. Philips is currently working on a much more efficient motor to spin the disc.

CD ROM recorders

If CD ROM is already the way to go, a lot of people must already be looking at the possibilities of pressing their own CD ROMs. The type of technology is called CD Recordable, or CD-R. The good news is that the price of CD-R machines are dropping fast. Here are some samples:

From one of the oldest makers of CDs around, Pinnacle Micro, comes the Recordable CD (RCD) 1000, which costs $ 2,995. A blank writeable CD costs $ 29.00, or about 4 cents per MB.

A little bit less expensive from RCD 1000 is Master CD, from MicroNet Technology, Inc. The price is $ 2,495. It is a single- speed CD writer, which means that writing the CD will take a lot more time.

Another company named Smart and Friendly offers CD-R 2000, a double-speed writer with 5 MB per second transfer rate. Its most useful feature is that it can be daisy-chained to other recorders so that you can create multiple copies of the same disc at the same time.

Finally, if you're really into CD mastering, you can get the $ 6,000, quadruple-speed dataDisc CDR4x. With this recorder, you can write 650 MB to a blank disc in just 15 minutes.

Besides these few samples, we still have many more offerings from other companies, including Yamaha Systems Technology Division, Plasmon Data Systems, Inc., and Meridian Data, Inc. Finally, Creative Lab has promised a read and write CD ROM drive that will cost you about $ 600.00. Although we haven't seen it, its good news.

All this is also bad news because it means that the government will have even more difficulty coping with the problem of copyright infringements. As I mentioned in one of my previous articles, full-length movies can now be stored in the 5.25" format, giving a death knell to the 12" laser discs that you've been renting every Friday night. With the CD authoring machines becoming more and more affordable, people will have one more powerful means of piracy going around.

Writing technique

In order to burn your own CD, you will need a fast, high- capacity hard disk. A 1 GB SCSI hard disk will meet these requirements. To begin the process, all the data to be stored on the CD will have to be stored on the hard disk; we have to create a 'virtual' CD first. Once the mirror CD is created on the hard disk, it will then be copied onto the blank CD.

Multimedia CD ROMs are much harder to write, as playback speed is extremely crucial. Files should be arranged in the mirror CD on the hard disk in such a way that access speed is optimized. This certainly requires a lot of technical skill.

Two of the current standards that these CD writers should follow are the High Sierra and ISO 9660. However, given their prices today, occasionally writing your own CD isn't worth it. Wait until prices go down some more and the technology matures.

Increasing capacity

Technology marches on, regardless of whether or not the government can cope with its implications. Storage capability will continue to grow, too. At the moment, a CD ROM can hold up to 680 MB of data. With the help of the MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) compression technique, this much data can play up to 74 minutes of full-featured movies, which consists of synchronized audio and video data. However, new techniques are being developed to squeeze even more data into each 5.25" platter.

One of these techniques is being offered by a Californian company named EWB & Associates. Called CapaCD, the technique can store from 1.5 to 10 times as much data as the conventional 680 MB CD ROM capacity. Compression techniques used by the compression engine vary according to the type of files stored on the CD. To be able to read a CapaCD compressed disc, a device driver should be installed on your system. The CapaCD-enabled drive will still be able to read standard CDs. Stacker, a familiar name in data compression technology, is also working on ways to stow more data into the disc. A side benefit of compressed CD is the increased transfer rates.

Still another technique comes from Phillips and 3M. They have joined to fine-tune a non-compression-based technology for storing up to 6.8 GB of data on a single disc. The technique relies on short wavelength red laser beams and double layering information. Philips Electronics N.V. predicts the CD will become available in 1996.