At 06:40 PM 8/16/2005, Greg Sevart typed:
Spend a bit more money and get some actually good discs. The Ritek/Ridata
stuff is pretty crappy anymore. They were good when their G04 media first
came out, but have been plagued by quality control and poor dyes ever
since.
I use Ritek DVD-R G05 8x disks & have never had a problem. My Pioneer A08
with 3rd party firmware easily burns these at 16x & I save $15 to $20 per
hundred as compared to buying Ritek 16x disks.
Have you performed PIE/PIF and PO scans on these discs after some time has
elapsed since burning? A simple "successful burn" is not nearly sufficient
to determine if the burn was a quality burn. A successful burn can easily
become unreadable within a week or two (but usually longer) if the burn
quality itself was poor. Or, the error rate might be such that many readers
are either unable to read the disc at all, or have to train down to produce
accurate playback. The Taiyo Yuden and MCC discs and dyes significantly
outperform Ritek discs in a the majority of burners and firmware. This
becomes even more important in RW and dual/double layer discs, where buying
anything other than MCC is being foolish. (consider this: Verbatim/MCC 2.4x
DVD+R9 DL discs can be successfully burned at 8x and produce excellent scan
results)
[Disclaimer: The overwhelming majority of my personal experience is with -R
media.]
Interestingly, you do touch on something I've seen both in reviews and in
burns and scans I've performed myself. A modern drive with modern media
produces a terrible result when burning at low speeds. While conventional
wisdom might suggest that burning an 8x disc at 2x would result in a better
burn, the PIE/PIF and PO scans provide extremely strong evidence that the
newer dyes and drives just don't work well at low speeds. Indeed, I've seen
better burns on 8x media when written at 12x than when written at 4, 6, or
the even the rated 8x.
In short, if you want your discs to have as long of a shelf life and
readability as possible, buy a quality burner, use quality media, and burn
the discs at least at the rated speed.
Greg
