Halc wrote:I haven't seen the PC-Professionell article, but there is a sense in measuring unburnt discs.
I fully agree that the physical properties of unrecorded media are important. c't always shows such results in their media tests. Here is a scan of part of the results from a c't test of DVD+RW media:
There's real information here: In addition to the graphic representation of the planarity (FE= Focus Error), they give numbers for RRO (=Radial Run Out), PPb (=Push Pull before recording, used for tracking during the recording) and the PPb Disc Variation and explain these quantities and the corresponding limits. So when they give a grade for these properties (in this case a "0" on their scale of 5), we know why.
The PC-Pro article showed nothing like this: They just give an overall index, without explaining how it's determined. The only physical results for all media are for RRO, and these values have no correlation at all with their overall index. Maybe we should just believe this ranking, but I'm a physicist and I want to have the basis for their conclusions available. Obviously the information is there- why don't they show more of it? Instead, they dedicate more than half the article to a discussion of the PI scans, which don't give us any useful info because of the limited and arbitrary testing scope.
Honestly, I much prefer passing on useful information. It really pisses me of when a (normally) serious magazine screws up a test like this!
G