Princo.. "grade A".. Opinions please.

[X-treme]

I'm new to the board, and have been searching for a while now. I still haven't quite found my answer to my question.

I know the debate over princo has been beaten to death, so i'll leave that alone.

In regards to judging the quality, what does 'grade a' mean?

On an online store, these are the specs of the princo's and I'm not quite sure how to analyze the information. Any input would be great.

Like I said, i've search for many hours and couldn't find nothing but countless debates.

Format: Cake box Packaging
Media Code Mfr: PRINCO
Formatted Size: Blank
Total Size: Blank (4.7GB)
Book Type: DVD-R
Media Type: V2.2 DVD-R
Media Code Id: Unknown
Write Strategy Speed: 4.0 X 5540Kb/s
Current Drive Speed: 4.0 X 5540Kb/s
Default Rotation: CLV
Linear Density: 0.267 um/bit
Layers: 1

Media Code:
00 6C 00 00 01 40 C1 FD 9E D8 52 00 02 65 0E 0B .l...@....R..e.. FE FF 80 00 03 52 49 54 45 4B 47 00 04 30 34 00 .....PRINCO . 00 00 00 00 05 88 80 00 00 00 01 00 06 06 0F 12 ................ A8 88 80 00 07 88 80 00 00 00 00 00 08 05 1B 0E ................ 10 08 09 00 09 97 06 0D 0B 80 00 00 0A 00 00 00 ................ 00 00 10 00 0B 06 21 13 A8 87 95 00 0C 99 99 88 ......!.........

[ebenton]

There was a thread about this a couple of weeks ago. I can't remember the exact subject that started it, but a large part of the thread was a flame war between "defense" and "quayboy" about "Grade A, B, C and D" disks. Quayboy said there was no such thing, and defense referenced a bunch of websites describing the standards for the various grades. I think if you do an all-forums search for "defense" you will find it, along with a lot of other informative posts about disk quality.
Basically, Grade A looks visually perfect (no dye smears, streaks or spots) *AND* will record all the way to 4.4 GB or beyond with no errors. Grade B will record the same as Grade A, but is cosmetically inferior. Grade C usually won't record perfectly, but will usually work for things like movies, where the read errors its inferior dye causes can be ignored by standalone DVD players. But you usually have trouble making a copy of a grade C disk, because of the read errors that you get from the inferior burn.
Grade D disks make good Kung Fu disks, or the proverbial drink coaster.

This is just a rough summary. Do the search I described for more detailed information.

[X-treme]

Thanks for the reply ebenton.