Ritek: NEVER EVER AGAIN

[handyguy]

Your reading drive is 2.5 years old? Have you considered cleaning it? It might read things better that way.

[lordsmurf]

Flashing a drive to make it region free has nothing to do with a disc not being able to be read back correctly.

Well, that's not true, as a statement. I think you're going for an unstated context.

When you flash a drive, all hell can break loose. There is always an inherent risk of damage to the hardware or snafu of the firmware chips. That includes fouling up the ability to read correctly. I was involved with firmware hacking about 5-6 years ago, it's a pest. I was usually able to recover a screwed-up drive, but not always.

[Super Warrior]

Yeah its sad. Once upon a time Ritek was a respectable, decent quality brand of media. Now they just suck and are probably close to the standard of landfill material that princo is.

Tayou Yuden is the stuff! Its both cheap and High quality. Only use TY.

[lec668]

Still surprising to read so many horror stories about Ritek, may be only because there were not so many manufacturers available a few years ago, so this brand was so common.

You certainly got a bad batch. I had trouble once with a 50 pack, all crap, you just had to check them PIO/PIE right after burning them to be sure they were not going to last.

After using G03, I burned about 1 thousand G04 Ritek three years ago (mainly bought from RIMA, 4x on Pioneer, Sony, NEC burners). As some users were experiencing troubles, I check a few of each batch.

Still no trouble !

I may recommend to buy only from respectable sellers, and check a few of each new batch with tools such as dvdinfo.

[Super Warrior]

Only riteks i kept that still work fine, were the media-type used before ritek ventured into the garbage media category. Forgot what they were called.

Ritek used to be fine when they used good quality media, now they suck and are nearly on the same level of crap as princo.

I may recommend to buy only from respectable sellers, and check a few of each new batch with tools such as dvdinfo.

Why bother...just buy TYs and you are assured to have MUCH better media than the landfill material ritek puts out these days.

TYs are pretty affordable too so there is no reason to settle for trash like ritek anymore.

[Bix]

Super[/url] Warrior]Only riteks i kept that still work fine, were the media-type used before ritek ventured into the garbage media category. Forgot what they were called.

G03?

[lordsmurf]

Ritek was garbage 10 years ago, when they made CD-R. Their first DVD-R were utter crap too, worse than Princo. Even a lot of the early and late G03 was pretty dismal stuff. Only for a short time did G03 seem to be quality, but even then, it was only second-rate to Verbatim, Pioneer, Maxell, TDK and others (2x-4x generation).

There are probably less manufacturers now, actually, than there were just a few years ago. Several have consolidated operations, other crappy ones have disappeared altogether.

"Bad batch" is an Internet myth. A "batch" of media is a minimum of thousands of discs. There is no way 50 here and 50 there are bad while others are not. Other factors are often at play, and the "bad batch" conclusion is poorly conceived and rushed.

[EddyH]

Disc rot is a myth

Er, no, sorry, I'm with MrLar all the way on this. Home-burnt optical media is pretty much expected to degrade over time unless kept in very, very exacting conditions (basically in an air conditioned coolbox with a light-tight seal), it's just a matter of when, hence so many of the premium ones guaranteeing your data for so-and-so many years. I even remember a graph of such on the back of the jewel case of the sample (2x speed) CDRs supplied with my first burner (fancy that eh, a burner with sample media ), stating their superiority to regular media because of how many more *days* (not weeks, months, years) of direct sunlight it took for them to fade to the benchmark 200-BLER failure level.
They're written using a focussed beam of otherwise normal, low intensity light (and read by an even lower intensity one). Therefore continued exposure to normal low intensity light is going to have some effect on them. Different formulations and coatings, however, will have a different susceptibility to ambient daylight compared to the laser beam. But they'll still be susceptible somehow, even if it's a lot longer process than that old 2x Ricoh CDR.
There's also literal rot that can take place, as seen on certain older pressed audio CDs; the plastic and other coatings start to biodegrade and delaminate, and can take the metallic / dye layer with it. Certain fungi can even accelerate this, making it an actual "rot" (thank you, "how clean is your house", for telling us about this )

And I've been there too and suffered similar dropout, though it was with CDR, and I caught it a little earlier. Luckily it was with a brand of disc I'd already determined as being junk (Memorex, I think it was, unusually?) owing to some write difficulties and rapid failures/breakdowns, so there weren't too many of them. All the same, I did end up carefully extracting the contents of several discs to HD and then burning them on more reliable media, as what were originally fairly solid recordings had, over the course of about 18 months of normal-to-careful storage, degraded to and near to the point of unreadability in places. Lucky I went to play that certain mp3 cd one day and then got curious enough to test it properly when it didnt work, or i might never have noticed and have lost the contents of all the others forever.

Do we have a list anywhere of potential brands that may be repackaged Riteks? I think I suffered some of them recently (white-tops off the internet) and would really like to know if the own-branded discs I'm burning at the moment are likely to start failing within a year or two rather than being good for about a decade of careful storage...

[lordsmurf]

Your information is all mixed up.

Commercial presses have no "dye" to be heard of. Laserdiscs had some aluminum issues that are well documented online (find a reliable source, not a user forum). Pressed media varies a bit, with each successive generation outperforming the last, on this exact topic. CD problems happen on unprotected or damaged reflective layers. This is not possible with DVD media, due to the sandwich of materials between polycarbonate layers.

The fungi that are known to infect media happen in such a small percentage of discs that it is pretty much impossible to study. We're talking 1 in several million odds. You'd have a better chance winning the lottery.

Your memory is not an accurate historical record. At no time was "days" written down as the lifespan of a recordable write-once disc. It's always been discussed in terms of decades.

Memorex has always been crappy media. From audio tapes to VHS to CD-R and DVD, Memorex re-brands some of the most pathetic crap on the market.

Ritek is found in a lot of brands these days: TDK, Maxell, Office Depot, Ridata, Fujifilm, and many more.

[SCDVD]

One of the problems in trying to link a brand name media to Ritek is that the brand name buyers switch around. You may buy Ritek manufactured media now and six months from now, the same brand of media might be CMC or other manufactures. This is especially true of store brand media.

[Super Warrior]

Super[/url] Warrior]Only riteks i kept that still work fine, were the media-type used before ritek ventured into the garbage media category. Forgot what they were called.

G03?

No, they were called Ricoh media according to DVDinfopro.

Back when Ritek was considered reliable, that was what they used. As i said i still have Ricoh riteks from years ago that still play perfectly fine, those were GOOD.

Ritek only took a turn for the worst when they stopped using that, and began using their own garbage brand.

[lordsmurf]

Ritek-made Ricoh-coded media is a fairly recent situation. Ricoh made their own discs just a few years ago. When Ritek took over, Ricoh really went down the crapper. The earliest Ricoh made by Ritek was Arita-overprinted because it probably failed QC to the mainstream brands. This is about the time Ritek started that multiple-tier grading scheme (or at very least, it's when the practice was discovered to folks like us).

[Gen-An]

Ricoh made their own CD-Rs in Japan for a while, but I don't think they ever did their own DVD media manufacturing.

[archaeo]

I have about a hundred Ritek G04's burned in 2004, and they are still working fine.

I do think that there are some generalizations being drawn here, (as lordsmurf has suggested) - conclusions being reached that have not been tested- especially compared to those who don't have issues with old G04's.

[videobread]

It's amazing to me how time Ritek takes up on this site. If you are new and are still considering buying Ritek for any reason. Think about it. Do you hear any other brand being dissed like Ritek. This same discussion has been going on for years now. Save yourself some trouble and just go with TY (or Ver or Max). You do not have to learn the hard way for yourself. If you have been around for a while and would still use Ritek for any reason. I'm afraid there is no hope for you.

[Super Warrior]

It's amazing to me how time Ritek takes up on this site. If you are new and are still considering buying Ritek for any reason. Think about it. Do you hear any other brand being dissed like Ritek.

Sad cause ritek used to be considered NICE quality 2nd tier media, i'd hear guys on computer shows like G4TechTV(Leo laport) talk about how it was all they used. Then one day Ritek just went down the crapper.

I wonder if this will someday happen to Tayou Yuden, going from being a highly-regarded media to another landfill brand of discs along the likes of ritek, princo, etc.

[lordsmurf]

Super[/url] Warrior]i'd hear guys on computer shows like G4TechTV (Leo laport) talk about how it was all they used.

Most of those people are just talking heads. They just regurgitate what they read online or were told by a fellow computer dork. It used to be fun to watch them squirm and back-peddle when they really botched up and were slammed with calls and e-mails to correct them.

It needs to be noted that Ritek is still a middle-quality disc. There are much better, there are far worse. Much of it depends on your luck and your burner.

[budz]

Save yourself some trouble and just go with TY (or Ver or Max).

Ummm....Maxell uses RITEK now.

[EddyH]

Your information is all mixed up.

no mate, you haven't read what i wrote properly

Commercial presses have no "dye" to be heard of.

Never said they did, which is why I bothered to write a seperate example for commercial media.

Laserdiscs had some aluminum issues that are well documented online (find a reliable source, not a user forum). Pressed media varies a bit, with each successive generation outperforming the last, on this exact topic. CD problems happen on unprotected or damaged reflective layers.

Fair enough, CD was where my experience came from, both personally (older music CDs where the silver is going 'crinkly' at the edge, but luckily they're from the days where a massive safe zone was left even on longer titles) and seeing people complain about it on TV shows. It does happen, regardless of the reason, and these weren't abused discs.
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about my experience and where my knowledge comes from, please leave it out. Also if memory is not reliable, a/ what are we doing swapping details from it on a grand scale, b/ what are exams for, c/ what are YOU adlibbing from?

This is not possible with DVD media, due to the sandwich of materials between polycarbonate layers.

Unless I missed something and it's got sealing at the edge, then it's still conceptually susceptible to delaminating, and stuff getting between the sandwich layers. CD also has plastic all around the metal part, it's just more uneven (much thicker on the bottom/reading side than the top/label side) rather than putting it roughly in the middle (or a bit further 'down' from that?)
The general point is that nothing lasts forever and home burnt optical media (and some - but certainly not a majority of - pressed discs) are somewhat more fragile than we're expected to believe.

The fungi that are known to infect media happen in such a small percentage of discs that it is pretty much impossible to study.

must have happened in enough of them for someone to discover it, sample it, and see it repeated so it was proved to not be a freak occurrence.

We're talking 1 in several million odds. You'd have a better chance winning the lottery.

fair enough, and my best example was from an episode of a tv program where a couple of interfering busybodies charge into the homes of incredibly, disgustingly dirty people and make them clean up their act (the stuff infected their entire freezer, for one thing) - though it wasn't the first place i'd heard of it.
and think about how many billions of these things are probably made every year

Your memory is not an accurate historical record.

it's the best i've got without spending a couple hours on researching stuff for what is starting to build up to an Internet Argument. i fear the original point may already have been lost. i do hope it's at least partway reliable otherwise the 2-hour test i'm taking for a professional qualification tomorrow is completely screwed.

At no time was "days" written down as the lifespan of a recordable write-once disc. It's always been discussed in terms of decades.

I have no way of refuting that without hunting through my entire CDR collection and seeing if that original disc still exists in it, in it's original box, so I can see whether I've got it right, see the full details, and scan it.
But it did stand out to me at the time as unusual, seeing that on the back of the jewel case when dragging it out of the box of the 18th Birthday Brand New Toy, and stuck with me since. And of course, it was *however many* days in *direct sunlight*. The exposure is radically reduced to the point of decades or even centuries if you keep it properly boxed and shelved at all times (cover of a book kept on a bookshelf or in a cupboard vs one left on a sunny windowledge...), but not everyone always does that, and not all methods are infalliable; opaque DVD boxes are probably quite a bit better than the semi-transparent jewel cases my failing CDRs were kept in (on a CD shelf).

Memorex has always been crappy media. From audio tapes to VHS to CD-R and DVD, Memorex re-brands some of the most pathetic crap on the market.

No argument there
(weeeeeeeeeell never noticed much wrong with their VHS tapes, but their CDRs were cack)

Ritek is found in a lot of brands these days: TDK, Maxell, Office Depot, Ridata, Fujifilm, and many more.

Imation? (the ones the works laptops had trouble with, even though both disc and drive were supposedly +R)

Hmm, that read a bit like a list of discs I've recently had trouble with, which is kind of why a growing portion of my collection is made of store-brand discs as they come up golden in tests.

:P

[lordsmurf]

Save yourself some trouble and just go with TY (or Ver or Max).

Ummm....Maxell uses RITEK now.

Actually, the Maxell brand seems to be moving to CMC and away from Ritek now. Really sucks. The discs are terrible. I've not seen Ritek Maxells in a while.

Maxell media is still manufactured, but only sold under the so-called "professional" line. The "professional" line really did not exist until the normal mainstream cases started to get filled with Ritek/CMC crap.

There's way too much BS marketing in DVD media.

[Super Warrior]

The whole attraction to Ritek from the begining: Was back when good quality recordable media was still very expensive, and Ritek was of decent quality and affordable.

These days now that GOOD media like Taiyo Yuden are as cheap as CD-Rs, thus there is no logical reason to settle for crap like Ritek anymore, and i feel sorry for anyone who still bothers with that brand.