So if the drives did exist at some point how come there's so little information about them on the internet? Even if they were failed products like flopticals, zips, orb, a seemingly huge amount of memory cards made by all major manufacturers and the *ahem*
Capacitance Electronic Disc I feel there should be at least pictures of one showing up when searching for "Mini CD reader", this comes up
But it's a modern drive, and also external.
You have to take into consideration when these devices were marketed: about thirty years ago.
Remember that the World Wide Web was in its infancy in 1992 and there were very, Very, VERY few people actively involved with it. A lot of the tech stuff lived in deadtrees magazines (like the scanned ad you posted) and a few things in USENET newsgroup. Web browsers were initially the domain of UNIX workstations in university or corporate (mostly technology company) environments, not on consumer grade PCs.
It's also important to note that there wasn't an easy way to put a photo online.
Let's say you had one of those Chinon drives and you wanted to post a photo of it. Buy a roll of 35mm film, stick it in a camera, take a photo, get the film processed and printed, then put the print down on an expensive flatbed scanner (or load up the slide caddy) and wait a couple of minutes for the scan. There wasn't widespread availability of free consumer grade photo editing apps.
A basic photo back then was about $1 per shot for the film and processing. And that didn't include the camera body itself, lenses or the scanner.
I remember owning an early CD-ROM drive from NEC, a top-loading unit. I think I had three titles and one of them was included with the unit; it was Adobe Type Library. And Adobe Type Library wasn't a collection of free fonts. It was a locked retail store. You could preview the fonts on the screen; if you wanted one, I think you called Adobe, paid with a credit card and got an unlock code to get access to the font suitcase.
The CD-ROM drive itself was really expensive. I remember diddling with passive and active SCSI terminators as I tried to daisy chain external peripherals.
Why would I want to spend several dollars to take photos of the device, wait a week for prints, then find a flatbed scanner (which I didn't have the budget for) to scan an image and write something about the device? To be read by a handful of people who might stumble upon it in a USENET group?
It makes more sense for some enthusiast to spend their time archiving their Sixties Corvette Stingray instead of some unpopular 3.5" optical drive.
Let's say your uncle died. In his garage was a 1965 Corvette Stingray that hadn't been driven for 30 years. In his attic was an unopened Chinon 355 series optical drive. I guarantee you that the rubber band that drove the optical drive would have disintegrated into dust and the grease lubricating the spindle likely would have coagulated so it couldn't rotate. How much time/effort would you put into refurbishing the optical drive? And then what would it be worth? A device with an obsolete interface and drivers that haven't been updated for 20 years?
Contrast that with the Corvette. Sure a bunch of parts might need to be replaced (including all of the upholstery, hoses, electrical) but it would command a fine price in the collectors market. You can still pump gasoline into it and drive it to the grocery store while people give you the thumbs up. Some people will offer to buy it.
I am unsurprised that there is almost no information on these Chinon drives today; the market has limited interest in this.
It's not a Sony Walkman or NES/Famicom.
you can still buy Blanks Both for CD (200 mb capacity ) and DVD I think capacity is around 1.4 gig
