SOOoooo, the CDR Brand thread has locked now, how sad... Time to freshen things up in this area I'd say! I know, I know, a noob trying to rally... I'm not so new, really, just quiet. I've been lurking in the media forum here for over half a year now and I've gotten the message that disk manufacturer is king, not the brand name the disc is sold under. This is a pretty dumb way for the brands to do business in my opinion.. The concept of brand name meaning uniformity is sure getting watered down! Be that as is may, ya gotta play the hand that's dealt. So, what's the current brand/product/manufacturer evaluation. Any reccomendations for people wanting to buy just 50 or even 25 good CDs of predictably high quality (initial writing) and longevity (cool dark place storage, occasional validation) Any chinks in the Ritek/Taiyo Yuden supremacy lately? I'll gather together some things I've gleaned here lately. Surprisingly someone bought Maxell CDR made by Ritek, one of the well respected disk manufacturers. Maxell is oft maligned, though... Is there anyone here with OLD Maxells made by Ritek? One would assume they are still around but there's been slight innuendo that brand has something to do with it even with a good manufacturer. Someone bought TDKs that were Ritek from Best Buy recently.. Would love to have hints on spotting the right TDKs. Who's branding Taiyo Yuden disks these days? I've seen references to some internet places places that sell these preferred brands in large quantities, but I'm interested in smaller quantites... Spindles of 25 or 50... Preferably US retail, but I would mail order were I guaranteed to get the good stuff. Lower speed rated CDRs also seem beneficial, (track record for the formulation) but don't seem to be easy to find... I'm personally interested in archiving Digital photos, a low volume, yet high importance sort of thing. I'd love to not have to worry about my archives! I'm sure I'm not alone in this. I'm sure there are many who assume that the 100 year theoretical life is the truth of the matter... -Bennett
Yeah. Me. I hate Ritek. Lousy discs... just for me tho so I cant rule it out as just sheer batch-coincidence. On the otherhand, I find CMC to be decently good for me (my fav is still Mitsubishi). Could just be my luck hehe.
I have recently been running on Taiyo Yuded (Plextor)and Mitsubishi (Verbatim). The prices have fallen so low that there is not much to save by buying cheapo CD-Rs. So my recommendation is to go with the finest brands. I haven't done Ritek much recently. But I must say that after durning 1000+ Riteks with no coasters, I trust them. p.s. New users can't post to old threads. That's why it seemed locked. But let's have an updated discussion and then summarize to the 'official' thread._X_X_X_X_X_[small]http://CD-RW.ORG Serving The Burners Burning The Servers[/small]
Ah, the noobs can't bump old threads... That makes some sense.. Wouldn't want a bunch of *BUMP* messages when someone decided to be funny/annoying. An additional question occurrs to me here that I haven't been able to glean the answer to, so I'll ask it here too. When you're able to successfully write a CD, does the drive manufacturer/setup have any influence on the Longevity of the disk? I have a teac dw-224E CD-RW/DVD combo in my laptop.. I'll accept that I'll get a coaster now and then, and that I should probably write single session CDs, but it'd be a nasty gash if a drive could write good CDs on good media, but they faded within a couple years... Again, could screw a bunch of people up... -Bennett
I store alot of photo's and artwork that I create on CD's. I mostly use Fujji film fom Japan and Verbatim Datalife plus not in spindles, but in packs of 6, or 7 and have had some of them for going on 2 yrs; I checked them all and they are still in tack. I bought a cheap pack once of Maxell colored CD R's and half of them failed to record, and of the ones that did record I could only open them in my DVD rom. I did a search on the internet and it's pretty disturbing that there is very little complaining about this, you would think that with the millions of people who burn CD's that there would be more complaints and some real horror stories of lost data; maybe until then companies will continue to sell cheaply made CD's to the public, it will probably get worse before it gets better. I recently had a pack of 25 ATERRA Media CD R's given to me as a gift, I tried them out and they seem to be fine, anyone else have any expierience with these? Take care.
That's been pretty much my experience. When I started learning about media manufacturers I discovered that almost all my old discs are CMC, but I've never had problems with them. Just to be safe I use Mitsubishis for my important burns, but I still use cheap ones (CMC) for a lot of things without any problems.
T.kelly: What's the ATIP on those discs? ===== CDRIdentifier allows you to read the ATIP on a blank cdr(w) (ATIP is essentially a code embedded into a CDR(W) that allows you to identify what company actually manufacturered the disc (as opposed to what company marketed it). For more info visit http://www.cd-rw.org/software/cdr_software/cdr_tools/cdridentifier.cfm
Is there a problem with Maxell CD-R's? I am using 48X Maxell CD's from Ritek, and they seem to work very well. (According to cdr-forum.de they are supposed to be from Taiyo Yuden, but when i use CDRIdentifier it says Ritek. How do the programs detect manufacturer from the ATIP? Is it stored in text, so they can just read it? Or do they use other ways of detecting who the manufacturer probably is? Is it certain that a CD-R comes from the manufacturer that CDRIdentifier lists?)
The Maxell CD R's I used were Color discs made in JAPAN. I can't get the ATIP info off of them because I threw away the blanks. The only blank CD's I have left are the ATERRA Media.................. ATERRA MEDIA CD-R ATIP: 97m 26s 07f Disc Manufacturer: Fornet International Pte Ltd. Reflective layer: Dye (Short strategy; e.g. Phthalocyanine) Media type: CD-Recordable Recording Speeds: min. unknown - max. unknown nominal Capacity: 702.82MB (79m 59s 71f / LBA: 359846) Take Care.
CMC discs have crackles & static noise when I play them back in all of my CD players. Other brands (TY, Ritek, Prodisc & Lead Data) don't have this problem. Better media I suppose. The TY & Ritek were bought online as silver/matte (unbranded) discs. Some old Memorex (white label blue print) was Ritek as well as a former Best Buy house brand called Digital Research. Lead Data was the GQ (Fry's) house brand & some Memorex Cool Colors I picked up turned out to be Prodisc. Some old Fugifilm I tried was made by the company itself. Sony CDR's seem to be good for now. For me though it's TY media all the way for both CDR & DVD media. I'm sold on it!!
We have had numerous problems with a variety of disc's. Today I was burning a cd and it asked for a blank so I inserted on and it came back saying it could not write to this media type?? I then inserted another disc from the same pack and it worked fine? Those were Memorex but we have had Sony fail in a Sony burner??
Shadow36 said: "We have had numerous problems with a variety of disc's. Today I was burning a cd and it asked for a blank so I inserted on and it came back saying it could not write to this media type?? I then inserted another disc from the same pack and it worked fine? Those were Memorex but we have had Sony fail in a Sony burner??" Not being able to write to a disc could be poor quality media. Most companies (including Memorex & Sony) do not make there own blank CD's & DVD's but instead buy them from whoever offers the cheapest price. Go here www.supermediastore.com & buy some Ritek or Taiyo Yuden media for your burner. Either is good with TY being the better quality disc. Your burning program should tell you who made the media but if it doesn't then search for CDcheck or Nero CD-DVD speed. Both are free programs & will tell you not only who made the media but also burn quality tests after you burn a disc. For CD's the companies to stay away from are CMC & Princo. I don't know who else to steer away from in CD media but I have had very good luck with TY, Ritek, Prodisc & Lead Data. For DVD's it's best to stay with TY for all speeds. The 16x Ritek DVD media is good but don't buy the 8X Ritek media as the discs sometimes go bad within a year of burning them. As to burning speeds the lower your speed the better the burn. I can burn CD's up to 48x in my Plextor 716-A DVD burner but I slow down to 32X & sometimes I'll burn a CD at 16x. Takes a little longer but I get better quality burns that way. For DVD's 4 to 8X is a good range. I've burned DVD's at 16x twice (by mistake) and the disc turned out ok but as I sais I prefer to burn slower. If your going to burn a lot of CD's & DVD's then keep your hard drive defragmented & don't run any other programs while burning. That advice is for making DVD's but it's good for CD's too. Also you might want to reboot your computer before burning discs as they flushes the computers memory. Burning programs. No idea what your using to burn discs with but these programs are good. Nero Burning Rom (my favorite) Roxio EZ Media Creater Sonic Digitalmedia Plus I believe all 3 will let you try the program out first before buying them however you should go to the support section of Nero's site & download all the installers (for both Nero & Roxio) as the 2 programs conflict with each other. In other words remove Roxio before installing Nero & vice versa. You can remove them with add/remove in the Windows control panel but run the ununstaller anyway to remove all traces of either program. Hope I've helped!
Thanks for the info. I generally do not do anything else when burning for the reasons you stated and I try to keep my h/d well defraged. Sucks about the media as we have a load of Memorex & Maxell to get through. Nero does seem to have complatabilty issues and it seems slow but I think its the prefered software.
