Trip To Fry's Electronics - Recordable DVD and BD Media

[Ian]

As many of you know, I live in Madison, Wisconsin. Despite the fact that my town is the home of a Big 10 college, the selection of recordable media, and computer components in general, is pretty limited. All we have is stores like Best Buy, Staples, Office Max, etc. and the best you can expect there is media from Verbatim or Sony.

My wife and I recently took a kid-free trip down to Chicago. Whenever I go down there I stop at Fry's Electronics. If you've never been to one, think of it as Newegg but in brick and mortar form. They have tons of stuff like motherboards, cases, hard drives, etc.

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The last time I was down there I was a bit disappointed with their selection of recordable media. They had a lot of semi-generic stuff like Optimum, etc. and even then there wasn't a lot of it. This time around, I was greeted by this:

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The selection of DVD media still wasn't great. The Optimum stuff was still hanging around but for the most part it was replaced by Kodak media.

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They also had some Ridata media that I hadn't seen before. Anyone know anything about these "Magic Silver" discs?

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[Ian]

And then you have the BD media. Again, they had a bunch of different brands but most of it seemed to be rated at only 4x.

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Hmmm.. $75 for two 50GB BD-R discs? I'd rather buy whatever they were smoking...

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And the only 100GB BDXL media they had there was $70. And that's for each disc.

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Buried in the BD media was some DVD M-DISCS. I was really hoping they'd have some of the new Blu-ray M-DISCS but no such luck.

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[Ian]

I really didnt spend much time in the optical drive section as they really didn't have a lot there. I noticed they had LG's latest 16x BD writer as well as one from ASUS that I hadn't seen before. No sign of Pioneer's new drives anywhere.

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[redk9258]

I've been to that store once. Almost worth the almost 300 mile drive. I could spend a whole day in there.

[Ian]

Yeah, my wife even likes going there. She likes looking at all the laptops.

[Dartman]

We have one here about 20 miles one way from my place. I go there every so often and it's a tech geeks paradise. I have bought drives, media, camera lenses, DVD players, a Sony HD radio, movies, and trinkets every time I go. Better figure at least a hour and maybe half a day just wandering around checking all the stuff out. Fry's is so cheap they bought out all the incredible Universe stores and just changed the name. For years they still had old Radio Shack gear on the shelves and their one delivery truck still said Incredible Universe with a small Fry's sign in stick on gold mail box letters on the doors.
They always have decent sales and have a ad in every Fridays paper and I used to always devour it when we were getting a paper here.
Probably lucky it's far enough away to limit my trips to hang out or I'd be broke and have even more tech junk here.
Be careful about their returned demo gear and nobody likes the quick bag search at the exit but worth it just to see the cheap toys, and they do have just about ANYTHING you need, from parts to chemicals and anything else tech related.