Good Printable DVD-R Disks?

[Scarpad]

Is there such a best I've tried Prodisk and Legacy's from new Egg and both generate many errors when running thru dvdinfopro or viewing. My Recorder is a Nec 2500A.

[Cholerabob]

Taiyo Yuden HUB printable, the best around.

[erbuk]

I’m not so sure you can find any cheap and good printable discs.

I bought a Canon IP3000 a few weeks ago together with a lot of different discs. I choose printable versions of discs that have worked well for me in the past and thought that they would be just as good as the non-printable versions.

Well, as you can see below I have good reason to feel disappointed. And from what I read in other threads in this forum I'm not alone



The yellow discs are printable and the green are branded/non-printable discs.

The writers are installed in different computers. DMA is enabled on all of them and all have the latest firmware versions.

Fail mean that I have burned at least 5 discs and all of them are unreadable. The Ricohjpn coded discs are always ok up to 90% so they are still ok for burning smaller images. But on the other discs the errors can occur anywhere on the disc and in some cases during the burn process.

50/50 means that some of the discs were ok and some not (not necessarily 50%).

OK means that all discs burned so far (at least 5 but in most cases many more) has been ok.

The write speed doesn't seem to matter. I get the same lousy result at 2x as at 8x.

The only reasonable prized and reliable printable disc I have found so far are Samsungs Pleomax 4x +R. I have burned 50 of them now and all have been ok. I'm sure the Verbatims and Taiyos are also very reliable and I know that the Maxells are. But they cost almost twice as much.

I have been doing this since the first generation of dvd-burners so I have seen a few crappy discs. Like some batches of Princo discs where 1 out of 10 turned out unreadable. But nothing like this where all discs fails

[beartums]

For printable, my experience is: TY Are great. I just burned a batch of fifty with no coasters. ProdiscF01 are inconsistent -- twenty burns, thirty coasters, ten more burns, then more coasters, etc. I just got a couple of hub-printable TY and hub-printable RITEKG05 from RIMA and I'll be trying them out today.

[freestyler]

Thirty coasters? Ouch.

[bidefordboy]

Have copied over 350 dvds using Ritek hub printables (G05) & Ritek non-hub printables (G04) on my Nec 2500a & have had no problems. My printer is the Epson R300 (same print quality as the R200 but with extra features). My settings using the 'Print CD' software provided with the printer are :- Hub printables 21mm-119mm, non-hub printables 42mm-119mm. Have checked my discs using 'dvdinfo' & have all been perfect.

[erbuk]

I ordered a few different G05 discs yesterday. I hope I will be able to say the same...

[jawgee]

Have copied over 350 dvds using Ritek hub printables (G05) & Ritek non-hub printables (G04) on my Nec 2500a & have had no problems. My printer is the Epson R300 (same print quality as the R200 but with extra features). My settings using the 'Print CD' software provided with the printer are :- Hub printables 21mm-119mm, non-hub printables 42mm-119mm. Have checked my discs using 'dvdinfo' & have all been perfect.

bidefordboy, what firmware are you using on your NEC 2500a? I ordered some G05 white hub printables from Supermediastore the other day & should be receiving them on Friday. I am slightly worried since I had problems with the G04s on my NEC 2500a, though that was many firmware revs ago.

Thanks,
jawgee

[bidefordboy]

Herrie's firmware 1.07.

[oldfart13]

I'm finding a lot of problems stem from people attempting to burn discs faster and faster. I have only a Pioneer A05 and an LG 4040B so 4X is it. I'm using the cheapest discs I can find (Boxing Day sales stuff) and only burning single episode TV shows that I record from my Panasonic E80H dvd recorder. I'm using CMC, MCC, Fuji, TY, Maxell, GSC, etc. discs. So far, none I've burned so much as skip! No freezes. Nothing! Why?

1) Less than 3 Gig used per disc.

2) Slow burning speeds.

I've noticed the same thing on CD recordings I've been doing. I use the LG 4040B and record at the maximum speed of 24X on 52X cheapy discs. I play them in my Chevy Impala which is really picky and there are no skips, stops or anything! I get reports from friends who are using the same discs but they are burning them at 48X and 52X and get nothing but errors. The motto as with everything else is speed kills! In this case, your attempts on making good CDs or DVDs...

[Gen-An]

There are plenty of people that burn high speed discs at their rated speeds (or even higher in the case of recordable DVDs) with no playback problems, so you can't make a blanket statement like "speed kills".

[beartums]

However, if you can keep the size down around 3GB your much more likely to burn successfully -- especially on sub-standard discs. Unfortunately, almost all of my burns are 4GB and higher -- those substandard discs won't even burn at 1x more than half the time. On the other hand, my TY hub-printables (rated 8x) burn at 12x on my Pioneer 108 -- so far 52 good burns with nary a coaster, all with more than 4GB of data. And six minutes to burn a disc. Pretty cool.

[Captain315]

Hope this is not considered hyjacking the thread. Thought it would fit the general conversation and didn't want to start another one.

I've searched through the forums and am confused about the Ritek-Ridata +r printable disks. Are these any good for use with the NEC 3500? http://www.supermediastore.com/ritek-ridata-4x-dvd-plus-r-white-inkjet-printable.html I've wasted so much money on bad media it makes a person want to give up on this hobby but there is just so much money to go around.

I also looked at the TY +r printables at the same site but they are almost twice as much as the Ritek. I'd be taking a chance on getting fake TYs as that seems to be a problem. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[oldfart13]

All I'm saying is slow the speed down and don't burn to the end of the disc and you can up your percentage of good discs. People on this thread alone much less this board seem to run into problems when burning anything because of the speed and hacked firmware. No hacked firmware in any of my drives and using cheapo discs results in me having 2 coasters in 500 discs! What is your result?

[erbuk]

Well, in my case lowering the speed had no effect at all and I would never use hacked firmware.

I have also burned hundreds of cheap discs wihout many coasters. For example, I have burned 225 Datawrite grey with media code Fujifilm03. Not a single coaster till I tried the printable version.

Are those 500 discs you mention printables?

[oldfart13]

Not as a rule but as a test I used some GSC001 printable discs that a friend uses for his rips. I told him to process a disc how he normally does (rips and burns to the full limit of the disc) and I would put a TV show episode recorded at XP speed from my Panasonic E80H onto another of the same batch and see what happens. We play these on my Bud's projection TV (Dell 100") with his Cyberhome DVD player. Result:

the ripped and burned to the end of the disc with hacked firmware pixellates and skips, finally stopping before the end of the disc. The single episode that I burned to the disc plays and fast forwards to the end of the episode without a hitch! No pixellation, no stopping, nothing! So my conclusion as far as this one test goes is...the same as I had originally. Next test will be to see if he slows his burns down and only burns under 4 Gig per disc if he gets improved playback performance.

[Gen-An]

Hope this is not considered hyjacking the thread. Thought it would fit the general conversation and didn't want to start another one.

I've searched through the forums and am confused about the Ritek-Ridata +r printable disks. Are these any good for use with the NEC 3500? http://www.supermediastore.com/ritek-ridata-4x-dvd-plus-r-white-inkjet-printable.html I've wasted so much money on bad media it makes a person want to give up on this hobby but there is just so much money to go around.

I also looked at the TY +r printables at the same site but they are almost twice as much as the Ritek. I'd be taking a chance on getting fake TYs as that seems to be a problem. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

If you buy TY media from super media store or Rima, you don't have to worry about getting fakes.

[chas0039]

Hope this is not considered hyjacking the thread. Thought it would fit the general conversation and didn't want to start another one.

I've searched through the forums and am confused about the Ritek-Ridata +r printable disks. Are these any good for use with the NEC 3500? http://www.supermediastore.com/ritek-ridata-4x-dvd-plus-r-white-inkjet-printable.html I've wasted so much money on bad media it makes a person want to give up on this hobby but there is just so much money to go around.

I also looked at the TY +r printables at the same site but they are almost twice as much as the Ritek. I'd be taking a chance on getting fake TYs as that seems to be a problem. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

If the Ritek +Rs you are looking at are R03s then I would avoid them as they are inconsistent. They are OK on an NEC 3500 but there are much better. I would try G05s as they are very good on my 3500 and they are always the same media code as well as being consistently good. In case you have not heard yet, avoid Prodisc. TY will, of course, be your best choice if you pay extra. I am curious, is there some reason you want +R?

[Captain315]

Unfortunately, I don't know how to quote another writer and can't find out how to do it. However, the reason I was wanting the +r is so I could change the book type and make them more compatible. I ended up (out of frustration) ordering 100 Ritek G05 -r printables from Super Media. I just hope I have as good of luck as you did with them. I've gone with every affordable brand there is and all seem to drop out around the 4 gig mark. Don't want to compress any more than I have to so I'd like them to go to the end.

[presto]

However, if you can keep the size down around 3GB your much more likely to burn successfully -- especially on sub-standard discs.

This is my experience too. For some reason when I try to burn more than 3GB on the disk Nero even says the Disk Verification is succesfull but the disk won't play!

When I check the disk in Nero's Disk Info tab it says that there is still room on the disk. On disks that work that area is greyed out, because, of course, there is no available room on the allready burned disk. Does this mean that Nero is failing to close the disk?

The entire home DVD industry should be ashamed of themselves. If you buy a cheap vhs tape it might give some artifacts but I never had one that wouldn't work at all. (ok, I'm sure it happens once in a blue moon).

[erbuk]

...and only burns under 4 Gig per disc if he gets improved playback performance.

My guess it that he will. As reported by others most of the time the problem occurs at the last 5-10% of the disc. So as long as you keep the size under 4GB there is usually no problem.

The entire home DVD industry should be ashamed of themselves.

Well, at least part of it. Some manufacturers/brands have nothing to be ashamed of but many of them have. I can understand that there is a difference in quality between a 30c disc and a $1 disc but not that 0% of the cheap discs does what it says on the box.

[chas0039]

However, the reason I was wanting the +r is so I could change the book type and make them more compatible.

You don't need to change the booktype on -R discs. They already are compatible. Only +R need the booktype changed.

[Captain315]

I know you can't change book types on -r discs. I wanted the +r so I could change them to -rom discs so they would be more compatible with different players.
My understanding is the +r with a booktype change are the most compatible of all disc formats. I just can't seem to find any good ones on Rima or SuperMedia except the TYs and they're so expensive. That's why I went with the G05 Ritek. You (chas0039) among others, seem to have good luck with them.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I'm referring to hub printable discs in all cases.

[chas0039]

I know you can't change book types on -r discs. I wanted the +r so I could change them to -rom discs so they would be more compatible with different players.
My understanding is the +r with a booktype change are the most compatible of all disc formats.

I may be wrong, but everything I have read indicates -R are more compatible, only by a little. You can't change the booktype on -R because they already read as ROM and you don't need to change it to be compatible.

Again, if I am wrong about booktype someone with better information please feel free to correct me.

[jawgee]

I burned a handful of white hub printable G05s this weekend with both my BTC 1016IM & NEC 2500A burners. Both burners burned the discs well, though the NEC had some trouble reading some of its own burned discs. No CRC errors, just a bit of slowdown witnessed in CD-DVD Speed. The same discs read in the BTC burner displayed perfect reads using CD-DVD Speed. All discs played perfectly in my Toshiba standalone.

Looks like I have a new favorite printable disc - the Ritek G05!!! So long, Prodisc!!!

Thanks,
jawgee

[roias]

I have some verbatim printable dvd-r and the five copies that i have made so far will not play on my jvc xv-n312 player. Up until know I have been able to play any dvd-r disk that I through at it. Can any one help.

[joeg04]

Recently I had pixellates and skips with some white inkjet printable RiData RITEKM02 4x DVD-R disks near the end of the disk @4x. Burner: Pio 107 FW 1.20, player: Pio DV-454. In the past I also had similar problems with white inkjet printable disks.

I had so far no problems with non-printable disks, like silver-top RITEKG04 4x DVD-R.
Also in other media posts I see more complains about inkjet printable disks than about non-printable disks regarding pixellation.

How can the white top layer influence playability?
My theory is, that the same problem occurs as with paper labels: The top layer is warping the disk slightly at the higher temperature in a DVD drive. This might occur, if the white top layer and the other plastic of the disk have different temperature expansion factors. If the disk is slightly warped, then on the outer side the laser optics can not focus properly.

What do you think?

[erbuk]

Yes, you are reading my mind

My Aopen burner has a special feature called ATCS (Automatic Tilt Calibration System) that is supposed to improve burn quality on warped discs. And that burner is the only one that can burn and read the last 5% on my Ritek (Ricoh) discs without problem. I can't see that any of my other writers has a similar feature.

The printable discs looks and feels exactly like the non-printables (that works fine) except from the surface. And the print surface is not thicker than the surface on some branded discs. So I doubt that can be the reason.

The only discs that has worked 100% error free for me (Samsung and Verbatim) has another type of printable surface. It feels like it has been printed/painted on the discs and it has a different structure than the other discs. On the discs that don't work it feels like they have glued a piece of paper on the disc.

[chas0039]

With all the problems and catastrophies that I have read here in the last few months I have permanently decided to avoid any printable media. To all you who brought this to our attention; much thanks. Between warping, and flaky surfaces and lack of drying and out of balance discs it will never be worth it.

[presto]

With all the problems and catastrophies that I have read here in the last few months I have permanently decided to avoid any printable media.

By that line of reasoning we should probably all avoid all things video

Actually I tried a different brand of Media and haven't had any problems. Burned about 5 disks so far with close to 4G on each. They are Ridata 4X.