TDK Armor DVD's

[EricS]

Hey all - I am about to start the process of archiving a bunch of 8MM videos to DVD for long term storage (10+ years). I will be using the Panasonic DMR-E60. I am trying to select the media to use. Right now I am leaning towards TDK 4x from Best Buy ($189/100). However I have seen the TDK Armor Plated (http://www.tdk.com/corp/tucpress/armordvd.html) and these look like they might be nice for long term, reliable video storage.

Anyone try these? Any info?

Any other suggestions for media to use for long term video archiving?

TIA

Eric

[snowmoon]

I would be wary of any claim about media relaiability or durability. It doesn't matter if the physical disk can hold up if the dye end up going bad in a decade.

Not that's it is untrue, but just reading the release gave me that "marketing droid" feeling. Give me facts, figures, and reliabile user feedback before I would spend my money on something like that.

[LanEvo7]

The armor dvds are supposed to withstand abuse, like dropping it, scratching it, etc. Its for people who don't take care of their discs. For what you are doing, the regular ones should be fine as long as you don't plan to play frisbee with it.

[tfj]

I read a review recently and it said that the discs are worth the extra dollar per disc. They took steel wool to the surface of the disc and it worked very well after the scratch test.

[snowmoon]

What review? Did they do the same to other name brand media?

[txpharoah]

It's more durable media. I tested some. I'm not even sure if they're out in stores yet. It's decent TDK dye/foil with much sturdier construction. Nice discs.

[poopyhead]

i tend to agree with snowmoon. any in-house testing needs to be verified by an independent group.

i'm sure it's more durable than regular DVD discs...but is it worth the extra money? if we're talking about DVD+Rs, that could be nearly $3 each...yikes!

also, they primarily are concerned with physical damage (i.e scratches, figerprints, dust, dirt, etc..) which can be easily taken care of with smarter handling...but what about the dye itself? what happens if the dye is exposed to the sunlight for awhile? what happens if we were to play these discs in a dvd player continously for a long time, as they do at exhibitions where the ambient temperature in the dvd player can rise enough to fry an egg and some strips of bacon.

the outside covering could be tougher, much tougher (i.e. vs kids), but if the dye itself isn't that much better than a regular DVD-R/+R, than it won't last much longer than regular, cheaper DVD discs that are carefully taken care of (as most ppl would do)

[gmatov]

http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#1.15

Go here to check out the blarney on "Armor Disks"

I don't know how you guys treat your disks, but I have a tendency to hold mine by the edges, or the edge and center hole, not the recorded area surface. And, they go back into the case after watching.

That said, my grandkids skitter theirs all over the DVD/PS2 desk surfaces, and no glitches.

This sounds like the gimmick Opticians use with polycarbonate lenses. "Treat" the lense to make it "scratch proof", charge you 20 bucks, but give you a "guarantee".

How many of you have a scratched disk that doesn't play? If you do, it just could be it's the data, rather than a scratch or 2 screwing up the data.

Anyone willing to take a backup that works properly, on a dollar disk, and take a bit of steel wool to it to see what is the result? I'd suggest scratching straight across, as that would be the easiest damage to do normally. You'd hardly set it down on a surface and rotate it to make circumferential scratches normally, would you?

This reminds me of when they came out with the full face shields on motorcycle helmets, Lexan polycarbonate, and demo'd them with coarse sandpaper; "Look, you could skid down the road on your face, and your heirs can use the helmet."

Txpharoah,

I hate to nitpick, but how can you say "much sturdier construction"?

All disks are 1.2 mm thick, in the case of DVD 2 pieces .6 mm thick, laminated with the recording layer between

So, disk "A", with "to spec" polycarbonate, would be equal to disk"B", with "to spec" polycarbonate. And, since polycarbonat is a commodity product, made by only the "biggies" in the plastics industry, everybody buys their raw material from half a dozen manufacturers. Damn, they're the same, as far as physical properties.

I grant the differences possible in the dye/refractive/reflective layer, but a treated piece of plastic don't hack it.

[garryheather]

It is my understanding that they use a different laminate on the top of the disc, thus helping minimize the potential damage FROM THAT SIDE.

Since the data is physically closer to the top of the disc than the underside, the top is more susceptible to damage by scratches, things being dropped on it, people writing on it with ballpoint pens and so on.

If you've ever deliberately scratched a disc (and CD-R's are excellent for demonstrating this), you will probably find plain, silver topped discs easier to scratch and flake off the reflective layer and fragments of the dye than say inkjet printables. It's down to the coating, and it gives the disc a little more chance against the surface being damaged.

However, all of these coatings are incredibly thin. Just as a stone will chip the paint on your car and then you realise just how thin that is, you can still drop things onto these discs and damage them, just as a sharp implement will break through.

Saying that, if they are lacquering the discs, possible even adding some granular medium to it to give it that extra substance, it could help them withstand rough handling like people chucking them in the jewel case upside down and whizzing the disc around with their finger until it finds the retention mechanism, or people buffing up the disc to remove fingerprints against the arse of their jeans.

Don't forget - the "armour" is only on the top as far as I am aware !

[gmatov]

Garryheather,
Please reread the first post. These are DVDs, not CDs. Hence, the recording layer is equidistant from top and bottom, .6 mm of polycarbonate top and bottom, phase change or burnable medium sandwiched in between.

CDs, I learned through these posts, are also 1.2 mm thick, but the recording layer is lacquered to the top of the SINGLE piece of polycarbonate, and can be scratched, delaminated, pulled off with a poorly installed label which the creator tried to replace with a new one, etc.

[schwinn]

I say be wary of paying extra for longer life disks.
TDK does indeed already sell some of the better quality disks it seems sofar. Way back when I paid extra for Sony Extra long life Beta cassettes for things i wanted to keep forever. Yes, I still have a working beta video machine. The Sony extra longlife tapes are the only ones which are flacking to pieces all over the place when i play them. Cloggs the heads in no time at all and likely will only play one last time for copying if I'm lucky. Nearly all the other tapes are fine including the regular Sony and even the no name brand cheap tapes are fine. Odd but true. So I am now very leary of paying extra without some sort of pruff. Your results may vary. Schwinn

[gmatov]

Since no one else seems to be active, here, I don't feel bad, multi-posting. Mebbe, I should just edit and add, but....

I don't know how some of you can take manufacturers word that "We make the best".

It seems that if the price is higher, it has "got" to be better.

"Archival Quality". What is that? "They" tell you their disk will last a hundred years. Yet, we have people on the site who tell you theirs are unuseable after months to, at most, a couple years. ( Let's face it, not too many people have had DVD burners longer than that. )

AND, is it possible that the unplayables are unplayable because we continually upgrade our playing applications, be it a software player, or a new DVD player. Just mebbe it's because the "old" format is now unreadable.

They tell you a disk will last for 100 years, depending on the type. (see my post above for the URL and peruse it.)

But, since it's only about 7 years old, from inception to production and to now,how do we know if they know what the hell they are talking about.? Granted, they use accelerated methods, punishing the disks unmercifully, but, I just took a DVD out of the player, and it was MUCH cooler than a freshly burnt CD-R, so I do not think the DVD is being abused by playing it.

So I don't see how running it 1000 times, or 10000 times, will show you what the true durability is. And, as someone mentioned, keeping it out of direct sunlight shouldn't help, either. Damn, if it can't take some sunlight, what good is it?

This goes for anything we buy. HDDs are good for 100,000 hours MTBF, they used to be 500,000 hours. But no one ran one for 4000 plus days before they started to sell them. That's 11 plus years, and if they waited till the tests were done, they'd be out of business. So they sold them and, if yours broke, they gave you a new one.

Hell of it is, I keep hearing guys say," Those disks were garbage. I shitcanned them." They didn't take them back. They ate them, and went to the forums, asked what was good, and bought some of them.

Ah, well, Barnum must have been right.

[gmatov]

Schwinn,
Don't feel bad about your Sony tapes. "You was took", plain and simple.

I've gotten into "arguments" with people because I want to put all my old LPs onto CD, as well as my old tapes. The biggest argument against was, "Well, look at Banks, and the US Government, and the stock exchanges, they keep all their data on tape, so it MUST be the best medium.

Well, sorry, but they have climate controlled computer centers, dust control, temperature, humidity, and, I would wager, on a regular basis, they re-record the tapes they have and use some kind of error checking software.

A tape is a thin piece of plastic, mylar, today, I think, but 20-30 years ago, who knows. And the bonding of the magnetic medium today is probably better. But still, tapes stretch from the first playing on, and the quality degrades, each play. I'd say you should get that last play out of them onto DVD or whatever. At least, if it still plays 5 years down the road, you will have the data to transfer to a "dilithium crystal" or whatever the latest marketing rage is at that time.

Of course we all know this is marketing driven, don't we. "No, we cant release the 48X DVD burner, because we'd lose all the profits from all the step-ups in between." Boy, kinda sounds like Intel.

[garryheather]

Gmatov - don't forget that the laser focuses "past" any scratches or defects that may be on the underside, with just a little scattering. Most people, when they refer to damage to discs (whether they be CD or DVD), refer to imperfections on the data side - the underside. This is NOT where TDK discs are protected, therefore some people could be misled.

If damage occurs to the disc that breaks through the surface and in some way physically damages the data, it is most likely to be from the top. Since this affects the reflective layer the most, through distortion, tearing etc, the top is still marginally more suscebtible to damage than the underside. Also, polycarbonate is a fairly soft material, and if something does drag across the media or puncture it, it will meet some resistance and therefore limit further movement. The top of the disc doesn't usually fair so well, which is why some manufacturers (it isn't just TDK !) promote double protection layers and the like.

The specification as to physically where the data on a pressed disc is very precise due to the dual layer issue, but the tolerance for recordable media is often notoriously misinterpreted. If you record something onto a blank and then deliberately damage it (or buy a professionally crippled test disc), you will usually find that the error correction mechanism is tripped up in the following order:

1. Surface damage, upper
2. Drilled hole / missing data (yes, they do drill holes in some test discs !)
3. Surface damage, lower

Regardless of where the layer is in the disc, if you do something nasty to it that penetrates the disc itself, you are still statistically more likely to damage the data from the top, whether CD or DVD. I do read posts, you know...

[Alan69]

underside. Also, polycarbonate is a fairly soft material, and if something does drag across the media or puncture it, it will meet some resistance and therefore limit further movement. The top of the disc doesn't usually fair so well,

You still seem to be talking about how CDs are as if it applies to DVDs. There is about the same thickness of polycarbonate on the top or bottom of a DVD as several others already said. The top necessarily fares about the same as the bottom from a physical damage perspective, and dozens of times better from the simple fact that scratches on the top have no effect..

Just straighten a paper clip and spend 5 minutes scratching up the top of a DVD-R with the end and see if you were correct. You have to scratch halfway through the disc to get to the data, just like from the bottom. But scratching the bottom will get you some errors long before you get halfway through the disc to the data itself. Scratching the top won't. Spend a minute scratching the bottom of that same disc and see if you don't already get some errors.

[garryheather]

Sorry, you're wrong about damage to the upper layer.

If you attack the top of a disc, whether it be CD or DVD, you cause an impression in the material it's made of. If you start imprinting this indentation onto the reflective layer then you start introducing tracking errors if nothing else. There is not a lot the player can do about this except through re-reads and error correction at it, but damage to the underside of the disc is often missed because the laser looks past this when it focuses on the disc. It is a different type of damage but both can render a disc unreadable.

If you shop around the specialist retailers you will be able to find test discs that have these "defects" built in to them made specifically for the hardware manufacturers with pathological test signals on them. Again, I stress BOTH CD & DVD test discs are available. They are made to much higher tolerances (and costs !) and will usually have either holes drilled into them or deliberate dark blemishes added to them, and calibrated scores along the data layer and the top. Professional mastering equipment which analyse the output of the stampers are blind calibrated against these. You can practically "see" where the defects on the discs are if you measure the C2 errors.

I am aware that CD's and DVD's have marginal differences when it comes to specifications BUT you have to understand that they are both optical media, share common components and therefore can both suffer common problems. I assure you, I can tell the difference between a CD and a DVD. My point is you should not buy armoured discs and treat them badly, because there is only a slight improvement to their overall suscebtability to damage sustained on the top.

[txpharoah]

My understanding of the new armor coating is that it is analogous to glass and bullet-proof glass. Old media would be glass, and the new armor-coated media are bullet-proof glass. This is how TDK explained it to me. After using some, I believe it.

[bnbhoha]

You can get them at rima.com for about $4.20 each. These are suppose to be the "next" generation dvd-rs.

http://www.rima.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=R&Product_Code=1673&C...tegory_Code=GU

[VEFF]

Garryheather,
Please reread the first post. These are DVDs, not CDs. Hence, the recording layer is equidistant from top and bottom, .6 mm of polycarbonate top and bottom, phase change or burnable medium sandwiched in between.

CDs, I learned through these posts, are also 1.2 mm thick, but the recording layer is lacquered to the top of the SINGLE piece of polycarbonate, and can be scratched, delaminated, pulled off with a poorly installed label which the creator tried to replace with a new one, etc.

Thanks for that valuable piece of information gmatov.

I learn something new every day.
I knew about CD-Rs having the recording layer near the top; I assumed DVD recordable media was similar in that respect.

[EricS]

Thanks to everyone that responded.

A couple followups from me:

I found these at thenerds.net:
http://www.thenerds.net/productpage.asp?c=147&sc=271&d=4&pn=460579&s=1

$3.63 each or $20.36/5 (Their math, not mine).

Questions for the folks who have used these - do you think they are worth a $2 premium per disk?

Question for gmatov: where on the dvd demystified site is the armor info? I wasnt able to find it.

Everyone else - does using the normal TDK's from best buy seem like a good plan for long term archiving if I dont spend the extra on the Armors?

Thanks

Eric

[txpharoah]

Maybe 50 cents or a dollar more, but not 2-4 bucks more.

Valuable, yes.
Worth getting ripped, no.

[gmatov]

Eric,
I didn't mention the armor as being analogous to bullet-proof glass, txpharoah did.

That's a little misleading, too. If his source used that analogy, he didn't know the first thing about bulet-proof glass. The next time you go to your local drive thru gas....well, you can't call them stations, anymore, but the place with the cashier in her little cubby. Note that the glass is actually numerous sheets of, maybe, tempered glass, bonded by plastic film, similarly to a windshield, except a windshield is 2 plies glass, one plastic film bonding them together.

Note, too, that the "bullet-proof" glass is about an inch thick.

Now, we can't do that with a DVD, it still has a focal length of .6 mm, or .024 inch. What, 4 pieces .005 plastic, 3 .001 plastic film to bond them together. If they play with the dimensions, they can hold the .024 focal length. No damn wonder they want a couple bucks apiece more.

So, I would venture it is more like my first analogy to eyeglasses, simply a surface treatment to toughen the surface to resist scratches.

I'd say that you would be dollars ahead, maybe many, to make two copies, archive one, and re-burn if your daily use disk gets scratched beyond use.

I know everyone realizes that marketers do use a lotta crap to part us from our hard-earned, don't we?

[EricS]

Yah - no kidding about marketers. Thats why I was looking for some input before spending what could amount to hundreds of dollars extra on disks.

g - in one of your posts above, you did say:

-- http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#1.15

-- Go here to check out the blarney on "Armor Disks"

Was 'here' supposed to be a link?

Thanks,

E

[gmatov]

EricS,

Yes, it should ba an active link. It's red. There's a ton of info on that site.

They don't mention TDK Armor. They're brand new, I guess. The point I was making is how much damage a disk CAN sustain and still be playable.

We think, WOW, data is written so closely on a DVD, that a minor scratch just HAS to wipe out a whole chapter, or something, whereas, the error correction in the DVD spec will cause, at most, a minor hiccup.

On a data CD, a minor scratch COULD actually obscure enough data to keep a program from functioning. My MS Office disk will not allow one dll to be copied correctly. Fortunately, I have the dll on the machine, so made a file of the disk's data, pasted the file into it and burned a clean backup, which is all I use for re-installs, now, as do not wish to damage the original any further.

[Alan69]

Gary, you are pretty clueless. Not for being wrong, but for insisting you're correct when others tell you you're wrong without ever checking your 'facts'. You didn't even know enough about the DVD disc construction to offer your first comments, much less be replying that my info was wrong.

A DVD doesn't have it's DATA layer on the top like a CD. It is in the middle and has a solid piece of plastic to guard it. The "upper" layer is in the middle of a DVD. It takes dozens of times more force to affect the data layer than a CD, it's pretty much a non-issue and no where near the most likely failure of a DVD as you said. JUST like I said the last time, but you weren't smart enough to check it out when told you're wrong. I haven't even burned 20 DVDs yet, yet I'm already far more knowledgeable about them than yourself, one of the advantages of reading correctly.

The point is correct, but not because you know what you're talking about. The chance of damage from the top IS about the same, because it's near zero in both types of DVD unless you use it for a frisbee. And no doubt you can get a test frisbee disc too, that has nothing to do with the construction, you need some classes in logic. CDs and DVDs are very different in where the upper data layer is, that has nothing to do with whether or not you can get test discs for both. CD's are hundreds of times easier to damage from the top, anyone knows this. Well except you apparently. You need to hunt for a newbie guide on disc construction for DVD and CD, they probably have one on this site.

No need to be sorry for me, I just got started in DVD but am already far ahead of you in understanding..

Alan

[gmatov]

Alan,

Calm down. I'm not a mod, so that's a request, not an order nor a demand.

I guess it would be easy enough to assume the 2 are constructed the same. I found it hard to believe people were peeling bad lables from CDs and pulling off the recording layer, till a thread a while back showed pictures of the same. I don't know if you saw it or not.

The same thread showed a schematic of the DVD construction, which is available on the link in my earlier post.

If you think about it, they make double sided DVDs (some movies ) so it seems to be quite obvious that the recording layer haas to be in the middle, or a double sided would have to be twice as thick, which would be twice the mass to spin up. Since the focusing mechanism is below the recorded side, they COULD be any thickness that could be crammed into the machine, as long as the focal length was held within a thousandth or so.

Still, I don't think these disks are worth the extra money. Burn 2 one dollar backups, rather than 1 $3.63, but only $4.50? if you buy the "Economy" 5 pack for 22 something. As the poster said, their math, not his.

Too many people here are getting too mad, too quickly, anymore.