This doesn't usually affect the labelling process, but in severe cases, it can affect the centring slightly. Generally, this results in a perfectly fixed, properly centred label with no air bubbles, but I have found that the labels tend to curl pretty badly when they're peeled off the backing. Next, the conical end of the centring jig, onto which the disc has been threaded, is placed in the centre of the label. After printing, the label is peeled off the protective backing and placed face up on the base. The mechanical part of the system is ridiculously simple - there's a circular plastic base with a hole in it, and a hand‑held centring jig onto which the CD being labelled is placed. Each sheet includes two rectangular labels that can be stuck on the outside of jewel boxes if you don't want to make a complete inlay card. Incidentally, replacement labels work out at around 10p per disc, which is pretty cost‑effective. The software is compatible with both Mac and PC platforms, and templates are supplied in Quark Xpress, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop formats, though you can make your own with any graphics program of your choice, and if you test the printing alignment on photocopies of the pukka labels, you can perfect your work without wasting any labels. Supplied as a boxed set, the basic Neato kit provides an alignment jig, 28 assorted plain colour labels (two per A4 sheet), a couple of inlay cards, one sheet of laser‑printable clear labels and a CD‑ROM containing printing templates and useful artwork. One such is Neato, a very simple manual system that enables self‑adhesive, ink jet/laser‑printable labels to be centred and stuck to the back of your disc accurately and easily. In all fairness, it's good that Yamaha is working hard to fix the problem but not so good for the user who has to do the work to make the drive perform as promised.As CD‑writers become more popular, so the need to label one‑off CDs more professionally grows, and a number of inexpensive labelling systems have emerged to meet that need. Yamaha knows of the problem and offers downloads on its Web site for CRW2100EZ owners, including a firmware upgrade and a free application to optimize ripping speed. Perhaps the biggest problem with the drive is an issue with the Adaptec software, which prevents the CRW2100EZ from extracting audio at Yamaha's claim of 40X. Also, in the packet-writing test, the Yamaha took almost 10 minutes to write a 400MB directory to CD-RW, trailing more than two minutes behind the Ricoh, though it had no problem reading the file back to the hard drive. Though the CRW2100EZ burned 500MB of data to CD-R faster than the Teac CDW512E and Plextor PlexWriter 12/10/32A, it was 15 seconds slower than the Ricoh MP7120A. But on other tests, 12X drives gave the CRW2100EZ a run for its money. In CNET Labs' tests, the Yamaha CRW2100EZ got the best time for burning an audio image to CD-R: less than 4 minutes for a 43-minute CD. The performance of the CRW2100EZ was mixed, and it fell short of our expectations for a 16X drive. Neato's MediaFace II 2.0 goes with the labeling kit and offers design ideas and templates, and PC users also get the full-featured MusicMatch Jukebox 5.1. Adobe has three titles for manipulating and organizing graphics and photos: ActiveShare, PhotoDeluxe Business Edition, and PageMill HTML editor. To this, Yamaha adds two more CDs' worth of applications and a CD-labeling kit. Unfortunately, compatibility and software problems hamper the drive's performance instead of a dream machine, the CRW2100EZ is something of a fixer-upper.Īt $299, the drive isn't the cheapest on the block, but Yamaha packs a ton of extras with the CRW2100EZ, starting with Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4.02d and DirectCD 3.01d (Toast 4.1.1 for Mac users) CD-mastering software. It comes with lots of extra software, a CD-labeling kit, and extensive documentation. An internal drive for PCs and Macs is an idea whose time has come, and its 16X write speeds, 10X rewrite speeds, and 40X audio extraction would make it the fastest on the market. At first glance, the Yamaha CRW2100EZ seems like a dream machine.
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