Those CD's are the absolute cheapest I've ever seen. Dr. Hank is a well-known brand in South America, and sell for about US$0.2/disc in large quantities, or, in some places, can reach even US$0.13/disc. Hardcovered and sturdy looking. This brand, some time ago, used Gigastorage media, now it has resorted to lower quality ones. Dr. Hank 16x Shine Blue: ATIP: 97m 27s 28f Disc Manufacturer: Princo Co. Reflective layer: Dye (Short strategy; e.g. Phthalocyanine) Media type: CD-Recordable Recording Speeds: min. unknown - max. unknown nominal Capacity: 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f / LBA: 359849) Notice the "Shine Blue" on the media name? Yes, it's Cyanine, a cyanine that looks darker than Ritek 1 and TY but lighter than AzoBlue or CMC 0. Notice how the ATIP says Phthalocyanine? This is just enough to generate a bad disc on most writers, and the "cheap cyanine" part should warrant no high-speed recording for it. Absolutely terrible.
You're mistaken there. Princo uses a patented cyanine-phthalocyanine hybrid dye which has a lot of the benefits of both dye types, but needs to be written to with a short strategy. Trust me when I say that Princo media can be written at obscenely fast speeds with no problems -- I have some old 8x Princos which burn just fine at 40x!!! They also have the benefit of working very well in DVD players. We have a lot of them here in the UK, and they are by no means bad discs, in fact I'd say they're better than Gigastorage.
Hmmm... Guess I should give it some tries then, I didn't know this, the blue color had me fooled. No problems with durability? Edit: How about sun resistance?