Visible Ritek defects, and dust on any media

[kentech]

Not wishing to reignite the pissing contest about retailers of Ritek disks, here's some fuel for the fire, nontheless. (Well, *that's* a mixed metaphor!)

I recently purchased from NewEgg a 50-pack of the "arrow-label" Ritek/Ridata G04 DVD-Rs, same type as mentioned before in this forum. I gave 20 to a client and kept 30.

From this batch, I have now found in the top 15 or so five defective disks; the defects are quite visible. There is one or more tiny bump/lumps under the *reflective* layer of the disk, as though there were a trapped particle behind the silvering and dye. When the burn reaches this point, the focus errors increase until the burn is aborted with an arror. You can then see where the burner (Plex PX-712A) is thrown off by this, leaving a blank, lightly-burned patch surrounding and downstream of the bump. No doubt as to what the problem is!

This is disheartening and indicates a dirty manufacturing process in addition to poor QC. I haven't a clue how often a batch is sampled by Ritek, but you really don't have to pick very far through this batch to find defects visible to the naked eye.

To prevent dirt-shadow errors, I always use one of those duster cans to blow off the bottom of each CD or DVD I burn while holding that side down. Cheap insurance! (I wonder about those "it stopped after 3GB"-type complaints I read: Is the user contributing to the problem?)

But physical defects buried within disks points directly at manufacturing sloppiness, and it will be a while before I buy more of these.

I am, by the way, *very* satisfied with the 50-pack of 4X ProDisc DVD-R S03s I recently bought from rima.com, as I have with BeAll 4X DVD-Rs and Memorex/Ricoh 4X DVD+R (8X recording). PlexTools 2.14 shows consistently very low C1/C2 errors on all of these.

Wonder if anyone else has experience with these or similar *before-burn* visible defects.

[Tearren]

Did they look like this?

http://www.supermediastore.com/ritek-4xdvdr-fs.html

Tearren

[kentech]

[Did they look like this?]

Exactly! I didn't pick then too carefully; I was also ordering a Plextor drive and thought to throw in some "reputable" blanks.
[/quote]

[Tearren]

You may want to check out this thread...

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=225634&highlight=

Tearren

[chas0039]

Problems such as this have been showing up for the past month or so, starting in the UK and then over here. I got a batch of these orange tops and returned 20% for visible defects. It looks as though they are starting to show up in other formats than orange which I understand are just an overprint anyway. I checked over the matte top DVD-Rs I got from Rima about 4 weeks ago and found no errors so I ordered 300 more and found no visible errors on any.

From here out though, I get Prodisc.


http://www.dvd-recordable.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Reviews&file=index&req=showcontent&id=76