Sony vs Verbatim

[Shaorin]

Which are these brands is better in DVD-R blank media? please do tell me the cons and pros

[gadgetguy]

http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/

[TBoneit]

Not to mention there is a whole long thread on the exact same subject recently. Short answer Sony burned ok for me but at 8x and verbatim burns ok at 12x.

The burner can even affect how media works for you.

[orsetto]

It is becoming more and more difficult to even try answering these brand-comparison questions on an international basis. We in the USA have no idea what media is actually being distributed in Australia under the major brand names: they subcontract production and distribution differently for different regions of the world.

In the USA, Sony (marked Made-In-Taiwan only) and Verbatim are within the same quality category, one or the other may be more compatible with any given burner. Sony Made-in-Taiwan is quite good, Sony Made-In-Malaysia is junk that fails for almost everyone, but Sony may not be required to mark the country of origin on the wrapper in Australia like they do in the USA: if you can't be certain the Sony media in your local stores is Made in Taiwan, you should probably avoid it because most of it now comes from Malaysia factories. Verbatim is more consistent than Sony in terms of enforcing factory tolerances, but also has issues: some newer batches of Verbatim use a newer dye formula that is not recognized by older hardware. If your recorder or burner was made before 2006, try a small package of Verbatim to see if it works for you. If it does, buy more . If your burner spits it out as an unrecognized disc, try another brand .

[SCDVD]

If your recorder or burner was made before 2006 ---

--- It's time to buy a new burner. For a shade over $30, you can buy a new burner and save yourself a lot of needless misery. There are two reasons to do this. 1.) the burner manufacturers don't support firmware upgrades on drives more than a year or two. This means that your burner will not be able to burn newer media with the correct write strategy. 2.) The laser in the burner starts to get "tired" and doesn't burn as well. Those two things are a double whammy; you can't write the correct write strategy on newer media and your laser is weaker as well.

[orsetto]

SCDVD wrote:

--- It's time to buy a new burner...

If only it was that simple in every case!

Unfortunately you cannot replace the burner in an older standalone DVD recorder with an updated model : you're stuck with the original proprietary burner. To feed these units you need to dig around and keep one step ahead of the blank DVD trends. Until and unless a large selection of affordable new DVD recorders with hard drives returns to the US market, many of us will be hanging on to our older dee-luxe recorders with a death grip. Finding compatible media for some of them gets harder as time goes by, tho... bummer...

[SCDVD]

Unfortunately you cannot replace the burner in an older standalone DVD recorder with an updated model

Good point. I know YMMV on any given recorder but I have a LiteOn 2005 recorder that I've had for at least three years. Last year the burner died in it. It didn't just start burning poorly; it just crapped out. I did some surfing looking for info about compatible burners that I could put in it. I found some web sites with a list of compatible burners. I manged to buy a LiteOn 851 which I installed and it works great. I know that this may not always be the case with any given recorder but it's worth some surfing to see if a compatible drive can be found for a given recorder. A side benefit is that my recorder now takes most any media that I use in it. For reasons that I don't understand the original drive didn't record well except on +R media.

[Nilfennasion]

Companies are required to mark the country that the product originated in somewhere on the product packaging when selling in Australia. But to cut a long story short, I have had more disc failures with Sony media than with any other brand I have burned. Not a large number, mind you, but three out of fifty is more than any other.

In the question of Sony v. Verbatim, TDK is the real answer.

[budz]

Companies are required to mark the country that the product originated in somewhere on the product packaging when selling in Australia. But to cut a long story short, I have had more disc failures with Sony media than with any other brand I have burned. Not a large number, mind you, but three out of fifty is more than any other.

In the question of Sony v. Verbatim, TDK is the real answer.

TDK is a joke since they've outsourced their dvd media for the last few years. Some like you swear by them but for me VERBATIM is winner when compared to SONY. I've had spindles of SONY where out of 50 discs 4-5 will only burn at 8x speed. Then when those discs are played back it stutters and freezes. I have many flavors of dvd burners and standalone dvd players. I have no problems whatsoever when using VERBATIM dvd media.

[AlanHK]

Unfortunately you cannot replace the burner in an older standalone DVD recorder with an updated model

Are you sure? Perhaps it's worth getting out a screwdriver and having a look if you haven't already.

The DVD recorders I've looked at (not many, admitedly) are basically PCs, and use many standard components.

Maybe you would need to brutalise the face plate, but the connections are very likely normal IDE.

[orsetto]

Unfortunately you cannot replace the burner in an older standalone DVD recorder with an updated model


Are you sure? Perhaps it's worth getting out a screwdriver and having a look if you haven't already.

The DVD recorders I've looked at (not many, admitedly) are basically PCs, and use many standard components.

Maybe you would need to brutalise the face plate, but the connections are very likely normal IDE.

It is true that on some brands of DVD recorder you can swap out the burner without much difficulty. But those recorders are usually not the ones highly prized by members here. The most popular and versatile Pioneer, Toshiba and Panasonic "vintage" machines use specially-modified burners with proprietary firmware. About all you can do when they break is repair them with cannibalized parts from another off-the-shelf PC burner of EXACTLY the same model, because the operating system of the recorder will not recognize or write to any other burner. (There have been spotty reports of limited success putting certain newer LG burners into certain Toshiba recorders, but its a last-resort kind of thing which causes a significant loss of functionality in most cases.)

Hence all the hand-wringing every time trusted mfrs like Verbatim get cute and update their dyes or whatever for no apparent reason: our obsolete DVD-recorder burners cannot be updated to keep pace with those changes the way PC burners can. Same deal when Sony moves to crummy factories in Malaysia or TDK outsources to CMC like the other 70% of all once-great brand names: new PC burners have incredibly flexible firmware strategies and stronger lasers, you can put any crazy disc in them and they'll figure out a way to burn them. Older DVD recorders are much, MUCH more particular.

[Nilfennasion]

Never had a problem with TDK single-layer media (bear in mind that I am in Australia, so it might be a different actual manufacturer).

I still use Verbatim for dual-layer jobs, however, since they are the only ones determined to make media that takes advantage of my burner's speed.

[oldandinthe way]

Some burners prefer certain brands of media.

The OPs question cannot be answered except in the context of his own burner.

The industry has recognized the problem of certain media burner pairs as important, as is media quality.

Problems with TDK media and other CMC media on the media section of this site, show certain brands of burner and certain models are providing the bulk of the reports of failed burns. Even when they have the latest firmware.

[Shaorin]

my dvd burner is a Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-110

[oldandinthe way]

https://www.videohelp.com/dvdwriters/pioneer-dvr-110d-dvr-r100-dvr-610/1244

[budz]

my dvd burner is a Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-110

Use VERBATIM or TAIYO YUDEN dvd media with your PIONEER 110 drive. Using any other brand of dvd media will render either coasters or read problems as the years go by. Cheap dvd media like MEMOREX & TDK which are manufactured by CMC or RITEK will render read problems in the future. When I first began burning dvd media I also used MEMOREX & I got failed burns with my first dvd burner the PLEXTOR 708A drive. I learned from other members in this website that MEMOREX was manufactured by those companies that I mentioned up above. Sure some other dvd burners will burn those cheap discs fine but later down the road they become unreadable. IMHO use good quality dvd media then you won't have any problems.