A few years ago, a VHS cassette i was using got stuck inside a dying VCR and it was impossible to get it out without dismantling the latter, and it ended up getting destroyed in any case. Today, a borrowed CD disappeared inside an optical drive that proceeded to die and i now have to work out how to extract it without damaging it so i can give it back to the person who lent us it. On another occasion, someone found their in-car cassette player would no longer eject a particular cassette and they were actually forced to take the car apart to get it out, damaging the vehicle irreparably in the process.
All of this is not good.
Therefore, i have to ask the question, why are devices never top-loading now? If they were, and ejectable by mechanical means alone, it would seem to make it a lot less annoying. Someone please enlighten me.
As an idea: devices which are currently front-loading and powered by electric motors should be top-loading and ejectable and insertable mechanically.-- nineteenthly, Jan 27 2005 By 'top loading', do you mean 'device with a mechanical eject'?-- brodie, Jan 27 2005 I read a car stereo manual that was a classic of badly translated Japanese. After telling you that you should only insert cassettes with the tape wound firmly on the spools, it warned: "Beware of tape salad!". This has since entered my vocabulary, being a brilliant description of what often happens.-- wagster, Jan 27 2005 What i mean is a hinged door which allows one to remove the media inside, which does not lock. It wouldn't inevitably be on top, but if it is, gravity rather than a tray would be used to bring optical media close to the laser. Also, the last resort would be to lift the door and remove the tape salad (brilliant metaphor [wagster], i wonder if it exists in Japanese).-- nineteenthly, Jan 27 2005 //actually forced to take the car apart to get it out, damaging the vehicle irreparably in the process.//Wow!, they must really know nothing about cars!. Don't most car stereos simply come out in one lump with pin connectors as the interface to the speakers and power?.?-- gnomethang, Jan 27 2005 This would remove the ability to stack A/V components.-- Worldgineer, Jan 27 2005 It wouldn't necessarily do that because the top component could be a top loader and the others could simply have doors. To reduce the height of the device, there could be a tray which swivels out, though i always think trays are fragile.
[gnomethang], i think they knew nothing about cars and i only heard about it, i didn't actually see it happen.-- nineteenthly, Jan 27 2005 Is there no paper clip hole in your CD drive?-- tiromancer, Jan 28 2005 logical, practical, would make the world a less annoying place.
but then, why not go further and make that type of customer-sympathetic design a legal requirement in all things, and have the manual be well-written enough to take it apart and together again, if you feel so inclined. like, if the little cord of rubber that opens and closes your cd-drive door breaks, you wouldn't have a problem simply opening it up and replacing the rubber band, hence enlarging the lifespan of many cd-drives? i imagine that the reason the latter has not been done already would explain why such an idea is currently not plausible.
j.-- Sp@rkp|ug, Feb 20 2005 [marked-as-rant]-- dbmag9, Apr 18 2006 Yes it did, but there seemed to be a problem with it which i imagined was connected to an air cushion forming under the disc due to lack of space inside the case, but at the same time that was probably just a fantasy connected to my hovercraft fetish. I have to say i don´t like the way discs just disappear into a Wii through a slot. The lens seems to drift out of kilter quickly on a Playstation, and actually optical drives generally. That brings up my other gripe, which is that i don't like optical media generally. I really think stuff would be better off without moving parts.-- nineteenthly, Feb 22 2009 //better off without moving parts// I imagine a USB 1GB non-volatile ROM drive would be pretty inexpensive for software/media distribution... a quick google got a price of $7 for a 1GB Flash USB RAM drive.-- FlyingToaster, Feb 22 2009 Yes, it's nearly there, but do they actually sell video files per se, as opposed to stuff on discs? So far as i know, we're not there yet because there would have to be either ROMs with videos on them or video files for sale as such, legally. Tipuet, but it doesn't exist so far as i know.-- nineteenthly, Feb 22 2009 And yet it can still be difficult to remove the fish.
It has occured to me that ROM chips for games could be brought back. With todays technology you could easily have a little computer within the cartridge and hide vital program code in it. It would be an effective copy protection mechanism. So it's likely you'll see games on USB ROM cartridges the very instant it becomes economically attractive. Possibly before.-- Bad Jim, Feb 22 2009 Well, it's a bit late to say that now! This is over four years old.-- nineteenthly, Feb 22 2009 BLTN-[better-late-than-never]?-- blissmiss, Feb 22 2009 At the time, there was definitely a trend among DVD drives to have slots. This is not so much the case now, but it's still the rule. Portable DVD players and the smaller models seem right now to be top-loaders; others still seem to have slots.-- nineteenthly, Feb 22 2009 I had to take apart an old DVD player when it died completely and there was no power whatsoever-thus, I could not open the tray and I couldn't tell if there was still a disk in it. I unscrewed it because I figured I might be able to repair it, but if not I could check if there was a disk in it. Not only was I NOT able to repair it, the disk reading part itself had a seperate metal shroud, part of which was *underneath* one of the circuit boards! I had to unscrew that board just to access the disk reading part. In other words, they built it so that the hardest to access parts are also the things that are *MOST LIKELY* to fail (the mechanical parts) and also the most likely to be repairable-if it's a busted belt or gear, it's far more obvious, and probably easier to source a replacement, than a burned-out electrical component (which is what happened to mine-but I couldn't tell which specific part had failed, and everything is soldered in place anyhow)-- Dickcheney6, Feb 11 2011 Top-loading is much better. All our local government officials are complaining about front-loading, for some reason.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 11 2011 You see? It's like the diagonal relationship, terahertz radiation, leggings and old vegetable oil - the answer to everything.-- nineteenthly, Feb 11 2011 You're thinking of the Brazilian Triangle.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 11 2011 " Is there no paper clip hole in your CD drive? — tiromancer, Jan 28 2005 "
Sadly, the paper clip manual eject option is now gone.-- normzone, Feb 11 2011 random, halfbakery