by cfitz on Sat Mar 22, 2003 5:30 pm
Are you seeing "silver" and "silver/blue" sold as different products on the same web site?
I believe these terms are remnants of the earlier days of CD-R. The first color is the color of the top of the CD-R, the second the color of the bottom. There was a time when the color of the discs and dyes seemed to have great importance to many people. There were debates and flame wars over which color CD-R was the "best". It was really a debate about reflective layer materials (silver=Ag, gold=Au) and dye types (with the perceived color of the dye substituting for the actual name of the dye - pale yellow/gold/silver = phthalocyanine, green/blue-green/blue/light-blue = cyanine, dark blue/blue = AZO/SuperAZO).
Eventually some of the mythology seemed to be defeated by reason, and people realized that the top of the disc could be made to appear gold even if the reflective layer isn't truly Au, that the perceived color of the dye could be influenced by the color of the reflective layer as well as coloring added to the polycarbonate substrate, and that good quality discs could be made from any of the dyes. These days it seems that talk about the color of CD-Rs is limited mostly to the bulk online retailers. I don't know why. Maybe it is because they are a little out of date, because they are selling generic stuff and have no other way to distinguish their products, or because they just haven't updated their sites.
As it relates to your particular question, Taiyo Yuden has always made discs using cyanine dye exclusively, so all TY discs are "blue". And most of their discs use silver reflective layers as well. They may make some with gold reflective layers, but I haven't seen them and they certainly aren't widely distributed here in America, assuming they do exist. So, the "silver" and "silver/blue" TY discs you are seeing are the same thing and typical of TY.
As for where to get discs online, I don't. I can pick up name brand TY for less at my local retailers. And I always wonder about the stuff many of the on-line bulk retailers sell. As I mentioned above, they seem to be behind the times. Another aspect of that is that they often are selling older, slower rated media. A quick perusal as I typed this showed a lot of sites selling 32x media, when 48x has been standard in retail outlets for a long time now. Thus, my thinking is: why buy generic discs online when I can get faster, cheaper, name brand media at my local retailer?
cfitz
