With so many CD-RW drives on the market, it is getting tough to distinguish between them. It used to be speed: fast drives were best. But nowadays they're all fast.

Then it was technology to prevent drive errors that caused discs to be ruined as they were written. Now they all have that, too.

Yamaha's newest drive has a couple of features that don't appear elsewhere but do they make it worth buying in preference to the others on the market?

The Yamaha CRW-F1 writes at up to 44-speed, meaning a full disk can theoretically be written in less than two minutes.

With the fastest drives claiming to record disks at 52-speed, the Yamaha is not the speediest around but writing at the faster speed will only shave a couple of seconds off the time, so it isn't that important.

CD-RW discs are written at 24-speed and ruined disks shouldn't be a problem thanks to the SafeBurn system that prevents buffer under-runs.

One of the features unique to Yamaha drives is Advanced Audio Master technology. It allows you to make higher than normal quality audio recordings to a standard disc.

However, the increased quality recording uses up more space on the disc, so a 74-minute CD will hold 64 minutes of Master Audio.

The shorter disks can still be played in standard CD players and Yamaha claims that sharp hearers will be able to spot the difference between Audio Master and standard discs. The secondary benefit is that discs will skip less than usual.

The final and truly unique feature of the drive is the Disct@2 (pronounced 'disc tattoo'). This allows any area on the disc that has no data written on it to be imprinted with text or monochrome images.

The software to put images and text on the disk is supplied as part of the Ahead Nero CD writing software.

It calculates how much room is left on the disc and allows you to enter text and images. The image or text is then burned onto the CD with the data.

It might seem like a bit of gimmick but after using it a few times, you'll probably find it actually quite useful - if only for indelibly personalising your CDs.

The CRW-F1 certainly stands out from the crowd and is well worth consideration.

DETAILS
Price: £140

Contact: Yamaha Europe 01525 289300
http://yamaha-online.de