Looking For Opinions On Different Brands Of DVD-R Media

[C44335]

With so many different brands of DVD-R media out there
(many I've never heard of)
which brands do you have best and/or worst luck with ?

Accu
MediaPro ???
Optodisc
Ritek
Prime ???
DVD-On ???
Princo
Emtec

[F1Pilot]

On an A05 with Nero 5.5+, I've gotten good consistent results from Accu, Ritek, TDK, Princo, DVD-On, Memorex, DVDPro, Verbatim and Pioneer (obviously). I've had nothing but problems with Khypermedia. Although I've known of people that used it without any problems, I got nothing but coasters.

[tazdevl]

I pretty much solely use Ritek 4X -R and on occasional Verbatim 4X +R.

If you buy cheap media like Princo 4X or others, they have spotty manufacturing/QA and the probability of getting a bad disc is much higher.

[Phoenix '97]

Princo (1x, 2x) isn't too bad from my experience... it's inexpensive but sometimes I have seek problems when trying to read them back on my Lite-On 166S 16x DVD-ROM. That is, if I seek around the disc too much the laser might get "lost" and eventually the drive will spit out the disc. Re-inserting the disc seems to help... and so does having the disc physically cool, near room temperature. Linear reads of entire folders isn't a problem though. My Toshiba burner doesn't have such problems - it can read all these perfectly.

[Halc]

The "quality of the disc" is dependent largely on the burner, just as it is with CD-R discs and CD-R burners.

While some media do score consistently better on various drives, it's not a guarantee it'll work on every drive.

For 4x DVD-R media, the best for Sony 500 and Pioneer 106 that I know of are:

- Verbatim 4x DVD-R
- Nanya 4x DVD-R

Both of these burn, use and measure (PI/PO in Kprobe using LiteON DVD-ROM) better than Ritek (up to G4), Princo and many cheap brands I've seen. However, it's not a guarantee that they'll work wonders in every burner (and reader).

regards,
Halcyon