What DVD-R media to use and what to do about scratches....

[wondertoons]

Greetings!

We have a Panasonic E50 and love it. For all out there with this...and everyone else too....what media do you have most luck with?

I've spent alot of times searching these boards and have seen so much info I can't keep it all together. We have found Maxell from Wal-Mart and some Memorex and some TDK to work the best....but still have some coasters. We are definitly going to stop labeling....

Also, where can I find the page with the links to the online stores to purchase?

Scratches - we bought a very nice "fixer" kit that was recommended - of course the little motorized tool ruined the disc...so we stuck with just using the cleaning/polisher liquid.

But we still have a few discs that with what appears to be not a significant scratch that freeze when they get in that general area. What do you recommend if anything?

Sorry if this is redundant but I've searched and searched and either didn't pull up much or get confused with all the brands.

THANKS

[Bob W]

I have burned well over 200 CompUSA 1X DVD-R ($45 for 50 or less on-sale) on my E50 with zero bad burns. Also have some 400 discs all full labeled and again not one problem. My experience with discs that skip (mostly near the end of the disc) has all been bad media (Verbatim, Memorex, and Apple). Finally I'm not sure that scratches on DVDR can be fixed since most don't have much in the way of a protective coating.

[wondertoons]

Also have some 400 discs all full labeled and again not one problem.

What type of labels has everyone been using? We've been using the plain old Memorex packs from Wal-Mart - leaving the full label with only the small whole on all our discs

We've had 3 people report problems with discs out of many that we have sent out and when they took the labels off they worked.

Is one company's labels thinner than another?

[Bob W]

I use the standard Fellowes Neato "US CD Labels" which I get at BestBuy. These days most of my labels are printed directly onto injet printable DVDR using an Epson 900 printer.

[garryheather]

CD's are easier to damage than DVD-/+R's because their recording surface is very near the top of the disc itself - a recordable DVD has the recording components embedded between two pieces of polycarbonate. But don't get complacent, if you drop something pointy on one you can make an indentation in the polycarbonate that causes tracking errors and the like.

If the scratch is on the data side of the disc, it's probably causing the laser to refract and through the tracking off more than anything else. Try another drive, slowing down the transfer rate (if your drive will let you), or try something like ISObuster which is much more "fault tolerant" to see if you can get the data off of the disc.

Some people have also reported good results cleaning with a mild abrasive like toothpaste, but I can't say I can vouch for that one. Make sure the scratch is clean and there is no debris in it, as all of that adds up and makes the reading of the device that much more difficult.