Can spraying a disc affect its longevity?

[PMorton]

Last year I produced a DVD for my church's youth group and gave each kid a copy. (It was a "documentary" of their missions trip to Mexico.) Ritek G05 burned at 8X, hub printable. I sprayed the discs with Krylon Clear Acrylic. They played perfectly.
Now not quite a year later, none of them play. It will play for a few minutes, then freeze. I know I didn't get anything on the bottoms when I sprayed. Did the spray do something to the disc?

[OneSickPup]

Not sure about the potential chemical reaction with the Krylon Acrylic, but the Ritek G05's is reason enough to explain your situation. I had to salvage rapidly degrading family videos from a batch of G05's awhile back. I luckily caught them before I lost anything but it was still frustrating. I also helped a friend on a Ritek salvage mission that was much worse because many of his were borderline playable when I got involved. I will never-ever use Ritek media again. Some people still have success with it - but I won't take the chance with anything important.

[classfour]

The main problems that I've seen with spraying printable media with a clear coat has to do with overspray near the edge of the disc. I used to have problems with DVDR media burned to 4.7GB, but playback was fine at 4.3GB. I initially thought this to be due to bad media, until I tested some that had not been clear coated, and found they scanned fine to the edge. I'd even seen some that had problems at the beginning of the disc. This brought me to the point of evaluating and modifying my coating process:

1. Fabricated a new disc painting tray design. These use a heavy wire support for holding during painting, and hanging for drying afterward. The base is made of a 120 mm standard size disc supported by a rubber plug that snugs up to the inside of the support disc's inner hole.

2. Thread the disc to be painted over the wire, ensure it is snug to the bottom disc to prevent overspray from slipping by; then place a hose washer over the center to prevent overspray from slipping past the center of the disc.

3. Holding the disc assembly at an angle from you, trying to keep the spray pattern directly at the top surface of the disc as much as possible (practice, practice), rotating the disc assembly while painting to ensure an even coating.

4. Hang to dry.

I haven't had any further problems with overspray after taking these steps. I have had one disc that had overspray when I didn't pay attention and keep it flush to the supporting assembly.

Playback has been excellent.

[BSpielbauer]

Last year I produced a DVD for my church's youth group and gave each kid a copy. (It was a "documentary" of their missions trip to Mexico.) Ritek G05 burned at 8X, hub printable. I sprayed the discs with Krylon Clear Acrylic. They played perfectly.
Now not quite a year later, none of them play. It will play for a few minutes, then freeze. I know I didn't get anything on the bottoms when I sprayed. Did the spray do something to the disc?

The Ritek G05 discs are actually famous for performing exactly as you described. They seem to undergo a solid burn, and the discs play fine, and then 9 months or 1 year or perhaps 15 months later, they all mysteriously have degraded to the point where they refuse to play. This has been widely discussed on this forum, and also on theother similar ones. An article appeared featuring a vice President of marketing from RiData to explain why (at the time) Ridata decided to "drop" the Ritek GO5s from their line. He explained it as a symptom of fast growth -- new factories were set up with the Ritek dye, to crank out more and more of the discs, since the GO4 line had driven their sales so high. However, most of these new factories did not have the quality control that the prior (reliable) GO4 factories were famous for. The result was a lot of really, really lousy media appeared on shelves, and his company did not want to be associated with that.

Do a search on keywords "Ritek" and "article" and I will bet you find some of the threads discussing this, as well as links to the actual article. I recall posting links to it on at least three occasions in the past year and a half.

Or, do a search on "Ritek" and "deteriorate" or perhaps "deterioration" and see what comes up.

RE: spraying -- the consensus seems to be that you must take great care to avoid any overspray, and the edges can cause problems.

However, your experiences with the Ritek GO5 discs mirror that of many others who did not use any sort of spray at all. Note: There ARE a lot of good GO5s on shelves (they came from the "older better" factories). There are also some that are doomed to fail months after the burn (they come from the "newer, expansion factories)." You cannot usually tell the Riteks apart. That is the problem, as that article explained.

You will also hear from those who insist they have never had a failure. Usually this means they just happened to be buying from the "good" factories. This is why I quit using Riteks completely, and only use Taiyo Yuden and Verbatims now.

-Bruce

[jimbop14]

Interesting to note the problems with Ritek G05 dye. I remember reading about it feb of last year (05). I have been buying Ritek G05 discs from svp.com for a while without any problems. (Ridisc Xtreme (Ritek G05 dye) (8x) DVD-R) Perhaps these are a good batch? Hmm will have to dig out a few of my older Xtreme discs and see how they perform. Will report back if any fail to read.

Cheers
Jimbop14