so when i read this thread all blanks are the best rofl.

i wouldnt listen on what other people tell. read test articles!

btw. to have no problems with a medium means not that it is good!

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I do VHS to DVD conversions for weddings and I do all my stuff on Riteks and have never had any go bad. But I can say that I have purchased other media from sellers like meritline and supermediastore and these went bad after only a few months.

As Alex said, I have heard of alot of people having good success with optodisc. None from personal experience though since the Riteks have been good to me and I never tried the Optodisc. You can get them from rima.com as well.

Edited by - matrixman on 5/24/2004 12:37:30 PM

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------------------
Regards and Thanks
ShiWarrior
- - BIG Breast Fan, in the likes of Minka & Linsey McKenzie - -

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I've had really good luck with Memorex DVD+R (4x) discs. I believe these are made in Japan by Ricoh.

Great luck with TDK and Maxwell DVD-R. Imation DVD-R worked generally well for me.

With regard to the cheap DVD-R discs at CompUSA, actually for me they have proven to work quite well, but are slow. I'm not sure how long they will hold up, so I don't record critical things on them. So far, no problems.

Recently, a bunch of Verbatim DVD-R discs I got at Sam's Club were dogs in my standalone Panasonic recorder. I thought the recorder might be burning out, but other discs are still working fine. Verbatim 4x +R are working well as are the +RW.

Fuji +R and +RW worked good for me so far also

My other recorders are a Pioneer 4x and Lite-On 4x.

-- Snowman

Edited by - snowman872 on 5/25/2004 3:38:42 AM

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I haven't used Ritek DVD-R's, but I have used Ritek DVD+R's and like them a lot.

Meritline also ships UPS ground for free. So $65 is the final price.

This sale ends on Monday.

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Don't buy the 200 pack (that's the quantity represented in the part number that you showed). Buy 2 of the 100 packs. The 200 pack is not on sale and costs $.05 more per disc than the 100 pack. When you get to checkout, you can change the quantity of the 100 pack to 2 and still get 200 discs at the lower price.

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It's better to buy at a store, as you can actually examine what you're buying and you can make a pretty educated guess on the spot--Korean media sold by Japanese companies is generally terrible. T-Y is made in Japan and says so on the discs.

Your best bet is to buy a 3-pack, put it in your drive, run k-probe,plextools nero's infotool, alchohol(i think) and find out WHO made the stuff. They all show up as a few predictable manufacturers---if it's a good one, go back and buy more. If it's garbage, try something else.

try

www.cdfreaks.com
www.cdrinfo.com
cd-rw.com, hydrogenaudio, to get a sense of what you want to buy more of.

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meritline has been undercutting wholesale for too much stuff they label as the manufacturers "a" grade, and people in the last month and a half are getting lots of slightly different specs than listed when they k-probe the stuff, their reseller rating took a hit too.

it's a shame they're selling the occasional b-stock stuff, i've ordered from them twice and been happy, but they really seem to be getting highly inconsistent about what's going to show up with the fedex guy.i'm still going to recommend T-Y as consistently superior or at least in the top handful of everything from cd-r to either dvd polarity. it's available for around a dollar/4x DVD+R for the 50 and 100-packs at RIMA.com, .accaproducts.com/and a few other places. I tried the former a few weeks ago, no complaints.

you definetly were right, but those companies both took some dives since x-mas and it's not worth my time to be paranoid about whether meritline is sending me what i'll get you some recent links if you're interested in the latest explosion of people pissed off at meritline's accuracy in labelling their products.

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The Fuji DVD+RW media I have is all made in Tawian. It works fine however for me so far. Nearly all the Fuji CD-R discs I have purchased over the years were Japanese.

-- Snowman

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Prodisc DVD-R was certified from the Pioneer Class A Lab. Recognition from the Pioneer Class A Lab requires passing more than 100 strict inspections on the product as well as the manufacturing processes.

They are available just about everywhere but we use Rima.com - this is the best supplier we have found and their customer service is outstanding.

Well .. that's my point of view .... from a girl ... HEY! I'm trying to fit in this man's world :)

Mandi*

Edited by - Mandi* on 6/5/2004 1:45:10 AM

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- Saki [faqs]

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DVD-R would be a great way to do on-demand pressing of old titles. But the penny pinching ways of the porn industry have poisoned the market against "those purple discs." Wow, another good think ruined by the porn industry. Who'da thunk it?

Oh well.

-T.C.

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So I figured, "if it ain't broke, don't break it". Now, I'm seeing DVD-R's for a better price than the +R's. So maybe it's time for a change. Has anybody had better success with one format over the other?

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Without exception, they all use DVD-R.

HTH,

T.C.

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- Saki [faqs]

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As far as choosing between dvd-r and dvd+r, apparently dvd-r is ever so slightly more compatible with stand alone dvd players.

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http://shop.store.yahoo.com/supermediastore/prodisc-4x-dvd-r-silver-47gb.html

500 Prodisc 4x DVD-R Matte Finish on Spindle Certified by Pioneer for $180.00. Just placed an order. I'm glad Meritline screwed on my CC.

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Tony, I've gotta respectfully disagree---DVD-R came first and was probably more mature a technology when your friends were doing their research so i'm sure they were correct. that hasn't been true starting with 4x drives and both of my plextors rate much better on + and the one i just got can't come close to 12x with minus. with very good drives like the nec2500 costing around 75 dollars, 8x is basically the standard, and almost all prefer +R media by a large margin at higher speeds-some more info

"Compatibility is a very sensitive topic when comparing the two technologies, but independently of media, recorders and players quality, some logical causes of incompatibility can be noted. Indeed, both recordable formats use values in the lead-in structures which were forbidden or reserved in the first DVD-ROM specification (e.g. disc structure, recording density, etc) and which can cause compatibility failures on some old or particularly picky players.

A famous example of such logical incompatibility is the "Book Type" field, which indicates the type of the disc. The first DVD-ROM specification only allowed 0 (i.e. read-only) to be written there, but later each recordable format defined its own value to identify itself ; unfortunately it turned out that some players simply refuse to read a disc with a non-zero value. To handle this problem, the latest DVD+R standard specifically authorizes to write a zero Book Type for compatibility reasons, and nowadays many drive manufacturers have made this bit programmable. But this cannot be done for DVD-R(W), as the Book Type (with several other information in the lead-in) are pre-embossed (i.e. pre-recorded) on blank media. Note however that although it reduces compatibility, this pre-recorded Book Type also improves copy-protection security, as it enables any player to easily identify a DVD-R(W) disc.

An additional compatibility risk exist with DVD-(W) in the user data area and is introduced by the 2K/32K linking methods. Indeed, the linking sectors used with these methods must use a special data type to be differentiated from normal data sectors, and this value was not allowed in the original DVD-ROM specification. There's no known study about the impact of this field on compatibility, but sector headers are a vital part of the decoding process, and therefore it is always safer to keep them fully compliant with the strictest DVD-ROM standard.

Conclusion

During my study of rewritable DVD formats it seemed very clear to me that DVD-R(W) standard was not as well designed as DVD+R(W) (or even DVD-RAM). And although some serious efforts have been put in the latest revisions of the - format to fix some of the original problems (at the cost of a much increased complexity), it still remains technically inferior to +, due to some intrinsic weaknesses (e.g. pre-pits). This is not very surprising, as Sony and Philips have a much longer experience at defining standards than Pioneer (and several key patents), and they also had the advantage to publish their standards after their competitors.

Although the arguments presented in this document might look like technical details to most readers, disc format is what defines the limits of what drives can do with a given medium, both in terms of performances and features. Therefore, the technical advantages of the DVD+R(W) format will with time turn into faster, more powerful and more reliable drives for end users. This is already the case today, and the gap will continue to increase as DVD+R(W) drives will exploit more and more of the advantages of the + format. However, as history showed, the best ideas are not guaranteed to win on technology markets, and only time will tell which format becomes the new standard."

btw, here's a wildly plagarized technical paper from cd-rw or somewhere i'd copied before i couldn't keep my eyes open-i'll be happy to find the link tommororw-

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My burner takes both +/- blanks.

Plus if you search hard you can get good name
DVDR blanks for a $1 or less each

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I'm planning to transfer -everything- to DVD-R to make shot logging easier (and take the strain off the camera), then make up my edits from the various DVDs.

Some of the cheaper DVD brands available locally here (in Australia) are Princo and Shintaro, does anyone have any knowledge of either of them? or perhaps some links to media review pages?

thanks,

scipio

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That's what I get for trying to save a buck.

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I've recently had some trouble with some DVD-R discs. Specifically, Verbatim DVD-R's from Sam's Club. About 5 in the cakebox (of 15) would not burn on my Panasonic standalone recorder and also gave me trouble with my computer drives (Pioneer and Lite-On).

-- Snowman

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The other thing that I think I will do is to buy the sampler packs from Rima. You can buy 1 or 2 of a bunch of different discs from them for $15 - 20. That's a great way to test what does and doesn't work for you without blowing a lot of money on buying a box of them.

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Anyhow, supposedly the drive would try to write to 4x media at 8x like some other drives can do and have terrible PI/p0 errors, if you don't have the most recent, maybe even beta firmware it's definetly worth a shot since people report it clears the high speed thing up almost perfectly. If you knew this-apologies in advance.

btw--on the thread you closed, please understand my reply was pretty staunchly anti-piracy, seeing we're probably on the same page about watermarks and non-redbook discs, which is that company's legacy while they're chilling in chapter 11.

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Also, the other thread wasn't locked based on your comments. It was closed when someone else decided to turn your comments into a debate.

Edited by - Bill on 8/9/2004 10:17:30 AM

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Thanks for clearing that up, I didn't want to seem like I was spitting in the face of a generally reasonable rule/guideline.

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I was using Riteks with no problems, but I am hesitant to buy them again as well since I am hearing in every forum that newer batches are crap. Everyone swears by Taiyo Yuden media and it is expensive but I guess you get what you pay for and an extra .40-.60 cents a disc is not going to break the bank.

I am going to order some from rima.com on my next order.

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- Saki [faqs]

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Dvdwriters Section

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also, the "compatibility" lists aren't always valid seeing as the characteristics of a drive can change so dramatically from firmware update to firmware update. some drives that were considered dogs when released became totally reliable after a release of better-tuned firmware. i'd only go by those things if they explicitly state which firmware they are using and it matches yours.

Edited by - jamesboston on 10/11/2004 2:49:03 AM

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