Advice - Quality of Blank DVD/CD

marienbad

I want to transfer stuff from my computer to dvd and cds.

A lot of it is precious - great sports events / photos/ music etc.

I have noticed that the cheap own brand cd/dvd on sale in supermarkets are great for doing music for the car of dvd's for the grandkids , but they deteriorate suprisingly quickly , than is even allowing for poor storage (left in car) and kids wear and tear.

On the principle that you get what you pay for , what are the best brands for long term storage of stuff like Heineken Cup Matches /Opera/Photos/Family documents etc.

Is this cloud computing thingy going to do away with all this worry ?

Taiyo Yuden are probably the most consistently good media. Im not sure if anywhere here sells them but certainly there's plenty of online places.

There are excellent Verbatims but unfortunately there are also average ones and you need to know what you're buying to get the good ones.

There is something called archival grade media which uses materials and dyes that should last much longer than regular writeable media. But expensive.

The burner and quality of burn is important also.

I would store them in jewel cases (so nothing is touching the surface of the disc) and somewhere dark.

yoyo

The trick is to use a good recorder, have used Taiyo Yuden before (imo very overpriced and I've had bad burns with it as well), Verbatim (some are good, some are dodgy) and atm I'm using Traxdata Ritek which I find is ok. No problems with degrading yet and I've used them for a while. Photographers seem to swear by the Taiyos, but prepare to pay around €75-80 for 100 real ones. Verbatim or Traxdata may be a happy medium, and considerably cheaper. JVC media if you can locate it is generally Taiyo Yuden, so worth keeping an eye out. Good guide here

Nick

Cherry_Cola

I've always sworn by Verbatim but my last 25 spindle had 6 dodgy ones. Hopefully it was jst a bad batch. Is there any way to differentiate between the better verbatims? I mainly use the discs with a printable face.

yoyo

Cherry_Cola wrote: »

I've always sworn by Verbatim but my last 25 spindle had 6 dodgy ones. Hopefully it was jst a bad batch. Is there any way to differentiate between the better verbatims? I mainly use the discs with a printable face.

Look at the Verb spindle, "Made In India" ones are not as good as "Made in Taiwan" or "Made in Singapore" I think. I wil admit I'm not an expert though

Nick

I've always sworn by Verbatim but my last 25 spindle had 6 dodgy ones. Hopefully it was jst a bad batch. Is there any way to differentiate between the better verbatims? I mainly use the discs with a printable face

Every type of disc has its own media ID. IMGBurn will tell you what it is, or any of the software I mentioned above.

Any decent blank media store should tell you the media ID of the discs. eg http://www.dvdshoponline.co.uk

So if you find some good discs that burn well in your machine then make a note of the media ID and stick with them. Check the disc periodically because a good initial burn and a long-lasting disc are two completely different things.

Also its worth noting that burners have built in profiles for each media ID. So you can have a very good disc, and it burns crap in your burner simply because they don't have a tailored burn profile for that disc in the firmware. Its a reason to keep firmware up to date and stick with common media.