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I was suprised to find that the Rietek blank DVD+R's are really Ricoh brand. Rietek brand is generally thought of as low or middle of the road quality. Ricoh is generally thought of as High Quality as far as Media is concerned.
Princo, CMC Magnetics, and a few others all fit in the Low quality category.
Fuji has historically used Taiyo Yuden as their manufacturer of their CD Blanks. Taiyo Yuden is generally thought of as making the BEST BLANKS in the industry (their price tends to agree, hehe). Now they are using Ricoh to do their DVD Blanks. Nice to see that they have selected another company known for the best media in world.
Last but not least, Memorex. While historically they have been know for middle to high quality media. I personally have experienced great results with their blank CD's, terrible results with their blank CDRW's, and have not tried their blank DVD's yet.
For those of you who have the Full version of Nero installed. Part of the install includes Nero CD Speed. This program is now a combination of CD Speed and thier old program DVD Speed. WEll.... It has a feature in it where you can ID a Blank DVD to see who the manufacturer is, very handy for the curious.
Oh yeah, Best Buy had 25 stacks of Fuji DVD+R's on sale with a couple rebates. After all the rebates the end cost was $1.60 per. That's about the lowest price I have seen anywhere for DVD+R (2.4x) blanks. Again they are really Ricoh brand (some of the best out there). Not sure if the sale is still on or not. Also not sure if it is at every Best Buy in the country.
Hope everyone finds this information interesting.....
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 29 Jan 03 2:51 PM
yankees
Inactive
29 Jan 2003 3:42 PM
You take the high road I'll take the low road(Princo, Accu, & Samsung Be All)! They work great for me.
aaronrand
Junior Member
29 Jan 2003 4:20 PM
Bestbuy had the sale nationwide last week, with rebate cost was about $1.60 each.
what do you use as a low end cheap brand works well, Princo?
Hackman
Inactive
29 Jan 2003 5:26 PM
Turak,
I found your research great! I know Media quality makes a big difference.
I've been using cheap Princo, Opto, Ritek... They burn fine on my Pioneer DVR-105 but have problems reading on some players (some read, some don't). I was about to sell my DVD players until I tried the following.
After investing more on brand name media, I found that they all played on both my players. So I found that Quality media do make a difference. So far, the cheapest media that works on all my DVD players is Meritline 1x at $1.22 I think. Samsung also works well at $1.70.
Thanks for your research.
-Hackman
Hooks
Inactive
30 Jan 2003 8:34 AM
The Princo DVD-R 100's on spindle on sale in Australia are actually branded 1X-2X.
They burn at 2X in my Pioneer AO3 with DVD Movie Factory and DVDxCOPY.
Have not had one disc failure out of approx. 150.
They are a fairly strong feeling disc, I think marginally thicker than some other brands.
No need in my case to spend any more on other so-called better brands.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 30 Jan 03 8:35 AM
dbminter
Member
7 Mar 2003 7:13 AM
Turak_
I found your research interesting, too. :)
"Princo, CMC Magnetics, and a few others all fit in the Low quality category."
I can attest to the CMC part! They were making, at one point, cake stacks of DVD-R's for Optodisc. For some reason, Optodisc had switched over to them, and 2 entire cake stacks turned out to be useless! Spotty results on different burners and players. They "tricked" me :) into thinking there was a problem with my LF-D311S and getting a DRU-500A to replace it, when, all along, it was these bad Optodiscs. (Manufacturer ID: "CMC00RG300")
"Last but not least, Memorex. While historically they have been know for middle to high quality media. I personally have experienced great results with their blank CD's, terrible results with their blank CDRW's, and have not tried their blank DVD's yet."
Well, their DVD-/+R discs have performed well. Although I've stopped using DVD+R discs since my DRU-500A doesn't burn discs that play on the DMR-E20 like the HP DVD200I did. However, Memorex DVD-RAM discs are garbage! They didn't even last to the 1,000 rewrites on a DVD+RW!
"For those of you who have the Full version of Nero installed. Part of the install includes Nero CD Speed. This program is now a combination of CD Speed and thier old program DVD Speed. WEll.... It has a feature in it where you can ID a Blank DVD to see who the manufacturer is, very handy for the curious."
DVD Decrypter has a similar function. But, it lists it in the Image function, and it is also dependent on the drive. It won't work on the LF-D311S, but, it does on the DRU-500A, EXCEPT for DVD+R discs.
DonBean
Junior Member
7 Mar 2003 7:25 AM
rima.com has ritek +r blanks for 1.50 now.....
321143
Member
7 Mar 2003 9:04 AM
Going to have to agree with you Turak.
My fist purchase of media in my dvd burning venture was a stack of 50 Memorex +R disks purchased at BestBuy back in December. First few burns went well, then three failures in a row. Knowing it could not be any of the software's used, I looked at the media under a strong light and found small aberrations or waviness throughout the three disks. So I went through the whole stack and found five others with the same small aberrations. In addition there were only 45 disks in a spindle of 50, and from what I read elsewhere the reason for that is Memorex used spindles designed for thinner cd disks.....It all comes down to "Quality Control".
BestBuy did honor the return, minus the eight disks.
I now know many of you favor Meritline disks so I tried their media, out of 50 disks I had two failures both for the same reason as Memorex.
(not too bad)
Now using Ritec, and so far not one problem, their media looks clear and bright.
I cannot substantiate their claims but at their respective websites:
Memorex states 30yr data life
Ritec states 100yr data life
"It all comes down to Quality Control"
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 7 Mar 03 9:16 AM
archer75
Inactive
7 Mar 2003 11:15 AM
I got these really cheapo ones from meritline, don't know whoe makes them, they are all blank, no printing on them, I know it was a no name company. They were .79 cents each and work great!
thegdog
Newbie
7 Mar 2003 7:25 PM
>I was suprised to find that the Rietek blank
>DVD+R's are really Ricoh brand. Rietek brand
>is generally thought of as low or middle of
>the road quality. Ricoh is generally thought
>of as High Quality as far as Media is
>concerned.
Actually, you have that backwards. Ritek is the manufacturer of the media. Ritek doesn't have media made for it by other companies; they (like Taiyo Yuden) actually have the disc manufacturing lines. And they manufacture media for other companies, like Fuji, Ricoh, DataWrite, etc. so that those companies can have their own "brand" of media.
From what I heard, Ricoh-branded media is made by Ritek. And the Fuji DVD+R media I just got on sale at Best Buy this week was Ritek-manufactured as well.
Ritek media is easy to identify as they have a code written on the hub of the disc, right by the hole. It normally starts off with E5, E6, H1, etc. The first two numbers indicate which manufacturing line they were made at. The remainder specify date of manufacture and other information as well.
I'm not sure who considers Ritek low-quality since among DVD-writing enthusiasts, it seems to be considered the best inexpensive media available. In fact, since Ritek switched production lines over to manufacture more 4x media, 2x DVD-R media (the infamous G03 media) has gone up in price by as much as 30% in the last month or two.
I haven't tried the Ritek DVD+R media yet, but if its as good as the 2x (G03) and 4x (G04) Ritek DVD-R media, it will be a winner.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 7 Mar 03 7:26 PM
dbminter
Member
7 Mar 2003 7:29 PM
I got a stack of 25 Ritek 2X DVD+R's. The few I've burned for tests and PC data backups work fine so far. I don't use +R for DVDXCopy because, unlike with the HPDVD200I I used to have, the DRU-500A doesn't burn DVD+R that played on all my test units.
thegdog
Newbie
7 Mar 2003 8:02 PM
Here is further information on the Ritek code.
This is an example of the code found on a Ritek DVD-R disc:
E64L1620915215000D11
In this example:
The "E64" is where at Ritek the media was produced. This would be Building E, 6th Floor, Manufacturing line 4.
The "L16" is the dye type. L16 is used on their G03 media and L19 is used on their G04 media. (Though that could change.)
The "20915" is the date. This corresponds to 09/15/2002.
The "215000D11" is a Ritek internal code for other things like surface color, worker, time, etc.
There have been 4 different codes that are prevalent for Ritek DVD recordable media: C1, E5, E6, and H1. (The first two digits in the code.)
Reports are that C1 is fine for 1x burning, but not for 2x. It tends to have flaky readability when written at 2x.
E5 works great at 2x, though these lines have been converted over to 4x media production and thus 2x E5 media are now rather hard to find.
E6 works great at 2x, and are comparable to the 2x E5 media.
H1 works fine at 2x on the Sony DRU-500A writer (and possibly the Pioneer DVR-A05/105 writers), though 1x should be used for Pioneer DVR-A04/104 writers.
---
Note: This information was compiled from posts by other people, including the wonderful team at http://www.lynxdv.com/ ... who happen to be a large seller of Ritek media in Europe.
dbminter
Member
8 Mar 2003 7:47 AM
I wish sellers of DVD media would list information like this about discs. The Manufacturer ID burned onto the disc, the various pieces from the serial #'s on the disc that identify the make, manufacturer, date, ink, etc. Because, otherwise, you can't tell until you physically possess the disc, which means you've already bought them. So, you may not know if a manufacturing change (*AHEM OPTODISC AHEM*) may ruin a batch of discs (OR two.) for you. :>
It is already over 90 days since last post to this thread, you're not allowed to post here anymore.
