Hi Cotty,

Short answer - Verbatim Archival Grade is the best, known brands work fine, avoid cheap media.

Long answer ( if you are interested) based to some research we made here last autumn (our local magazine ordered a story about it). First of all - DVD-drive matters. Without a good one even the very best media can't help you out. There are always some writing faults, but thanks to error correction technologies we don't "see and feel" anything. Special testing software turns off any error correction and will show true results. Basically, good burner is able to record without significant errors to most media, while a bad one works more or less fine only with really good discs. Therefore - to compare different discs, rubbish burner works the best. My everyday burner is ASUS DRW-2014 and it is quite impossible to determine any differences at all (only some no-name discs showed slightly higher error rate).

For our story we got some couple years old dirt-cheap LG drive. Three discs of every brand and kind were burned, stored for a month in climate chamber (+50deg C, 90% humidity) and checked for errors. The very best (of those available here in Estonia) was Verbatim Archival Grade. Virtually no errors at all. The second best were TDK Extra Fine Matt discs - but only without applied inkjet print. The second batch was printed before aging and those had about 4 times higher error rate (though, standard DVD error correction would repair it easily). We also got slightly more errors with "regular" Maxells, Philips, Verbatims and TDKs (but again, all of 'em are quite safely below error correction capabilities).Unfortunately it turned out, that my previously much-liked EMTEC gold discs were not that good at all (in combination with cheap drive. My photo archive discs are fine thanks to good burner). Our tested cheap brands performed noticeably worse (from best to worse): Omega, Acme, ePerformance and Princo. Last two of 'em had more faults than standard error correction would fix.

BR, Margus


Cotty wrote:
Why is it that with all the resources of the world available through the
internet, I still keep coming back to the wisdom of the PDML when it
comes to reviews and recommendations?

I have previously used TDK DVD-R single layer media for recording video
onto for playing in domestic DVD players, and on computers. Seems to
work well.

Anyone have any better or different recommendations?

Thanks.


--


Cheers,
  Cotty


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