What I have learned

[BetaMaster]

Ah for the good old days working with CD-R media. I bought the cheapest stuff I could find and after burning several hundred disks, only one got ruined or went bad, and that's because something sticky got on the surface and pulled off the written surface.

However, my experience with DVD media has been most frustrating. I know everyone here has been through the same thing. It's getting so that you can't count on anything anymore. I had a bad experience with cheap generic media, and went to better generic media. It was worse.

However, generalization is dangerous. We can all share information, but denigrating a particular product isn't helpful - it just works against sharing information when we rant, even when the rant is justified. However, here is my new philosophy about DVD media, at least until the industry gets its act together

- Forget about the difference between -R, +R and -RAM. These are minor compatibility issues compared to the individual media. I have learned that some drives love some media, and other drives hate it. Media/Drive compatibility is far more important than anything nowadays. Media that works just great on my drive may be useful for frisbees after going through yours. Conversely, media that you can't get to burn may sail flawlessly through mine.

- Support people are just guessing. No-one can really tell you why a particular disk failed to burn properly on your machine. Sure, we know why some disks are garbage after 4GB, but why do some disks not get initialized or terminated? You would think the people at the major manufacturers would be scouring this board looking for people with problems. Considering the amount of media we burn through, one customer's bad experience can lose them thousands of dollars every few years.

- Speed doesn't kill. Burning at a lower speed won't turn bad media into good media. Good 4X media will burn just as well, if not better, at 4X than at 2X, while bad media will fail at 1X.

- Read the reports for your drive. You will not have a good experience with a media that another user of the drive has had a bad experience with. If you can't find a person who has tested your media, don't buy more than five at a time. The only thing worse than a coaster is blank media you can't use after the first four don't work.

[kyemeng]

My drive NEC2500 accepts all kinds of media except for one (Optodisc) which although burn fine, just could not play either in the writer itself or a standby dvd player. Media which I have tried include TDK, Maxwell, Fuji, Evermedia, Ritek and some other crap 2x discs in an assortment of +R and -R.

[ZAPPER]

BetaMaster:
You have spoken words of wisdom.
Funny thing though, the last spindle of 50 Memorex CD-Rs that I bought was cheaper than the small pack w/cases. Another thing that I wonder about is, just what in the hell happens to all my cases? I mean I don't give any away to the people at work when I turn in files or photos. A 50 pack of disk last me a year, but 50 cases are gone in 3 months. I just don't get it?