Hello! Yes, a very weird thing. I have recently discovered that these gold -bottomed (showing the manufacturing year as 1998) discs are getting hard to read correctly. In EAC my DVD-drive (Hitachi GD-2500) is getting varying CRCs even with the same track when reading it multiple times. C2 is not enabled. On the other hand my CDRW drive (LG GCE-8320B) reads these discs correctly but it's way slower than than normally. What makes this interesting is that the greenish-yellow -bottomed Kodak CDRs manufactured in the same year are not giving problems at all. Markus
Interesting. Please, report it in this thread : http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/3247 where we're tracking all CDRs that become unreadable after some time.
Pio, I am pretty sure that Kodak and Mitsui worked together in developing the gold dye disc, so this issue is "related" to the problems you and I have had with early Mitsui discs (the spots). I have a couple of Kodaks, all well so far.
Actually I am not sure about my last remark anymore. I have these feeling that I read about Kodak+Mitsui co-operation, but I wasn't able to verify it with a quick Google search. Yeah, Kodak has the patent for formazan.
...and TDK patented metal-stabilized cyanine Raw cyanine was terrible... by the way, when a pthalocyanine manufacturer like Mitsui shows graph proving the superiority of pthalocyanine over cyanine, with numbers such as 20 years for cyanine and 100 years for pthalo, they might well talk about raw cyanine, which is completely irrelevant, since every cyanine CDR manufacturer use metal-stabilized cyanine ! I'm not sure either about the involvement of Kodak in pthalocyanine patent, of course, any patent co-owner will claim the ownership for himself in his website.
Kodak DID patent Formazan, but those gold and gold+silver discs are phthalocyanine. The Formazan discs were the dark-green-colored "Digital Science" and "Digital Audio" discs, and were phthalocyanine type 7, as opposed to type 5 of the phthalo discs.