unbranded DVD-Rs are useless ?

[BUGANNA]

Hi everyone,

I recently bought a few DVD-Rs from different co.s including some unbranded ones...

I found the unbranded discs would not play properly in a domestic dvd player, they would pause and skip all the time...

all the other brands worked ok, although there is a BIG difference between a quality brand ( Maxell - Pioneer etc ) and the cheaper ones ( Princo ) on DVD-RW discs.....

One low priced disc I found to work excellently is made by 'DataSafe'....

cost about £3.30 per disc, where the unbranded cost me £2.00 each...

does anyone know how long before the price of quality discs drops dramatically ?

any other info ?

Buggs.

[leebo]

"does anyone know how long before the price of quality discs drops dramatically ?"


September 16, 2004.

[BUGANNA]

thanx Leebo !!

i'll make a note in my diary.

while youre here - you couldnt tell me a couple of stocks that are going to bounce over the next few days ?


Buggs....

[stuart49]

You only get what you pay for,but cheap rubbish and you are wasting your money,buy Verbatims as they are simply the best on the market,just as there cd's are also recognised as the best ...

[lucindrea]

i dont know about dvd's but with cd-r's their are only 6 mfgrs of the ink in the world .. so no matter the brand .. the ink came out of one of the 6 .. now when a cd is made it goes through QA and gets a ranking ( lets say 1-3 .. 1 being 0 erors 3 being over 2% error ) .. the brand name companys will only take a given quality ... just an example .. maxcell cd-rs and hp cd-r's are 100% the same thing ... just differnt label , so you may find maxcell cdr's are a bit more expencive than the hp ones in the same store , then go for the hp's.

but for the most part , you get what you pay for.

[Leehro]

I've found a similar problem with DVD-R discs. I've tried pioneer (came with the drive), memorex, imation, tdk, and cd-recordable.com unbranded.

the memorex and cdr.com discs only burned at 1x (on my A03). I had stutter problems on the cdr.com discs on my standalone.

The others burned at 2x and played fine. I'm eager to try some verbatims. haven't found them in a store yet and i'm mostly testing single discs. But I'm very happy with the imation and tdks. Pioneer/apple discs are good too, but again, haven't seen them for sale locally.

The TDK/imations were $7 or 8 i think (at CompUSA), and the memorex were $6. So yeah, you get what you pay for.

Still trying to settle on a format. Verbatim CD-Rs were always my favorite because of the blue bottom, but they seemed to play very well in all my players too.

Dan

[edited to add price comments]

[lucindrea]

verbatims i found in MicroCenter ... $39.99 for a 5 pack ( ~$7.90 apice ) ... but i also have a 50 pack of "house brand" in some ups truck on the way .. cost me $71 ... i expect to make a few coasters at that price but if 10 of the 50 are good then it would still be cheaper.

[Leehro]

I don't think "10 out of 50" being good is really a great way to judge it. If 1 out of 50 DVD players can read any of those discs, it's not such a great deal.

And in 10 years when NOTHING can read the discs, it won't be such a great deal either.

I'll stick to good media. Hopefully I can find some deals, but a great deal on garbage is still garbage.

Dan

[Trainman]

Ok, next question... The el-cheapo dvd-r discs are crap for playing dvd-r movies on set-top players, but how are they for storing data from your computer? Any problems to be expected there?

[leebo]

I have three set top DVD players and they all play the so called "el cheepo" DVD-R blanks fine. My Panasonic only has a problem if the video was ripped from a Hollywood Disc.

As fer as data, I haven't had a problem with either of my computers reading ANY disc.