After our yesterday post, we got an email about a review of the new Digital Camera from Sony, which supports CD-R media.

"...Completely aside from the issue of size, the other thing blocking our thought processes about CD-Rs in digicams was our awareness of how finicky CD-R writing can be: We've got more than our fair share of "coasters" (non-functional, written CD-Rs) to prove the point. It seems this is an area where Sony's electromechanical/optoelectronic engineers really worked overtime, in designing a CD-R system with sufficiently robust head-tracking to enable it to write successfully, even in the face of moderate amounts of vibration, changes in orientation, etc..

It turns out that "packet writing" is the key to avoiding this problem, as it provides a way for the CD recorder to drop discrete chunks of data into place, without having to open and close a "session" each time. Tricky stuff, but it works. In order to read the resulting disks with a normal CD drive though, you have to "finalize" a session, which eats about 8% (roughly 13 megabytes for sessions after the first one, for lead-in and lead-out areas) of the total disk space. Thus, you'll want to view the images in the camera until you're ready to offload a fair number of them. Alternatively, if you have a packet-capable CD-R drive (note, CD-R, not just a CD-ROM drive), driver software from Adaptec (and possibly others) will let you read the disks, even if they haven't been "finalized." This could be viewed as a bit of a limitation, but the MVC-CD1000 also sports the first USB port on a Mavica, allowing images to be read from "unfinalized" disks just as you would from a normal USB-connected digicam..."