Has anyone tried out Meritline HQ 4x Media?

[robrosen]

Just curious as to whether it works at the rated speed and whether it's compatible with DVD players.

[defense]

Disturbed1 and myself are testing these disks from meritline. They are long...tens which are also sold under the Matrx/Speedy name from shop4tech. Apparently, the long..ten disks from meritline were manufactured in Taiwain while the Shop4tech long..ten media were manufactured in Hong Kong. We both agree these disks seem to be higher quality then the ones from shop4tech...but we haven't tested enough yet.

When we do, one of us will post the feedback along with Kprobe comparisons between the two disks.

Note: Either way, these disks are still not compatibile with the Sony burners to burn @4x. If you have a different burner, look at the chart on meritline's web page...it will tell you what max speeds in which these disks can be successfully burned.

[disturbed1]

Copied from my post at Meritlines forum

Review for HQ media-

Equiptment:
Pioneer A05 FW 1.30 not hacked
Pioneer A03 FW 2.00 hacked 2xforall
Panasonic LF-D311 FW A108
DVD Maestro Authoring and Image making
DVD Decrypter to burn using SPTI interface.
Lite On 165H for read back.


Media ID:
00 6C 00 00 01 40 C1 FD 9E D8 52 00 02 F7 0E 0B .L...@....R.....
77 88 70 00 03 4C 4F 4E 47 54 45 00 04 4E 20 30 W.P..LONGTE..N 0
30 31 00 00 05 AA A2 22 22 20 01 00 06 0B 0F 12 01....."" ......
66 66 80 00 07 88 80 00 00 00 00 00 08 01 1B 0B FF..............
0F 08 08 00 09 55 09 10 0B 90 88 00 0A 80 88 80 .....U..........
88 80 10 00 0B 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0C 00 00 00 ................

Physical apperance:
Blank silver on top with a clear plastic hub. Only 2 or 3 had a slight glue spot on the center hub. The dye layer is purple, not light, nor dark, just plain purple. Darker than Accu/DVD-Pro, lighter than Ritek. The dye layer appears to be even from edge to edge, no blemish. Overall, looks pretty high quality.

Burning:
I burnt 15 HQ's at 4x with my A05 (3 data discs), 3 at 2x with my A03, and 2 at 1x with my LF-D311. All burn cycles were completed with any errors. The burn speed was a true 4x (~14 min), and a true 2x with the A03 (~28 min). I had zero burning problems.

Playback:
For playback I used a multitude of stand a lone dvd players. Panasonic S35, Apex 500A, Apex 500w, Apex 5131, Sony PS2 (movie only, not game disc), Philips FWD5, Apex 1110W, Apex 1100W, Emerson 2200, 2 year old GPX (model # is worn off). All discs for the most part played back just fine. The GPX, and Apex 500w showed some skips and pauses. These were random, and not repeated if I replayed the same disc again. These problems appeared on 10 of the tested discs, 8 4x discs, 2 2x discs. I did notice a slightly slower loading time on my Panasonic, however, chapter skips, and disc navigation was as speedy as it should be. No other player showed any problems. Overall-- outstanding considering the price point of these discs.

Data disc results-
I made a 4.2gig winrar compressed file, a 4.32 gig mp3 data disc, and a 4.37gig empty sector data file to record to each DVD. The DVD was read back perfectly by a Hitatichi GD-7500, Panasonic LF-D311, Pioneer A03, Pioneer A05, Pioneer 116, and Lite On 165. No problems with file access, nor complete copy/image making.


KProbe for "bad" HQ


Nero CD Speed for "bad" HQ


KProbe for "good" HQ


Nero CD Speed for "good" HQ


That "bad" test result, was the worse results that I had from 20 discs. All of the others were real close to the "good" test result. Some better, some worse, but pretty close non the less. There was a total of 2 that had "bad" test results.

The "bad" result was one of the discs that paused and skipped on the Apex, and GPX players.

[robrosen]

Thanks for the responses. Anyone else tried the Meritline HQ media?

[Aztec_gizmo]

I tried them and I am getting inconsistent results. Sometimes when I place the burned DVD in my JVC DVD player it ejects the DVD because it cannot read the DVD. Last night it ejected it three times. Then it finally read it. Also, if the movie is able to play, certain parts of the movie pause and get macro blocks. Before this 4x media from Meritline, I used 4x media from a vendor called Sunpower without a problem. I tried burning with Recordnow Max and Nero and both give me the same results with the 4x media from Meritline. So, I believe it is the media that is messing me up.

[robrosen]

Any other experiences with Meritline's HQ 4x media?

[robrosen]

A month later, Meritline is still selling these HQ 4X DVD-R's. Anyone have any experiences to report?