CDRLabs.com

the worst for me was HI-VAL because the label top coating would flake or crinkle like confetti

Traxdata CD-R made by Computer Italy Science . Burned at 4X ( ! ) there was some errors including C2 errors . The last time i tried to read one ( not new but in multisession and in good physical shape without scratches ) , my drive could not read it , suddenly it was spinning more and more until i feared some accident like cd exploding at high speed in and out drive . I pushed the button to open the tray . The media was still turning by himself at medium speed .
Definitely the crappier media i have ever used ( even without thinking to the " turning by himself event " ) .

I don't think you ll encounter these media because i assume they are mainly or only produced in Europe for European market .

GQ (Great Quality) and some of the CMC made media is really cheap quality.

When I had my older 12x the worst was maxell, wouldn't burn half the time. Now it's CMC stuff because as already stated the layer flakes of with a finger nail. it burns somewhat OK as long as you don't over do it, just very fragile.
When we started doing this we always looked for the TUFF topcoat type stuff and gold layers.

There have been a fair few over the years...

First there were some "Koch" media made by Koch themselves in Germany. I bought this thinking it would be high-grade media (after all Koch are a respected company) for archiving. What I got was media that wouldn't burn properly and then wouldn't last more than 3 months. Absolutely terrible media.

Anything by Lead Data has disappointed me as well. It never lasts well, even though it tends to burn nicely. This company is the most consistently bad I've come across.

There was some bad "Master/CDR Pro" media sold in the high street in the UK as well. This was made by CPO (Customer Pressing Oosterhout) in the Netherlands. Appalling. Said it was "multispeed" in the 8x/16x days; wouldn't even burn at 2x without errors on 4 different writers. The burn was all mottled and inconsistent as well.

Then there's the CMC cyanine type 0 media. There were two types of this media; one was deep blue-on-silver, the other a dull blue-green. The latter was hopeless; bad burns above 2x, incompatible with many players and some writers wouldn't touch it. To be fair, it didn't last too badly.

Funnily enough, apart from Lead-Data, I haven't found any *really* bad phthalocyanine media yet!!

Computer Italy Science media which caused me some issues were Phthalocyanine media as reported in the ATIP .

Imation Branded CMC is by far the worst. CMC sucks in general also.

Phillips CMC 40x are good.

aviationwiz wrote:Imation Branded CMC is by far the worst. CMC sucks in general also.

Phillips CMC 40x are good.

I think the exact opposite. Of course, it really varies from batch to batch. Nothing like quality control, eh?

Right now the worst discs I have are some Maxell 40x manufactured by Ritek. I really regret buying them.

I have an old spindle of 50 PNY 12X discs that I bought back when I got my first 12X burner (summer 2000) -- let's just say, despite the fact I have burned hundreds of CDs since, I still have about 25 of those PNY's.. they're the only CDR I've ever seen that manages to 'forget' everything you've burned on them within 5 minutes of finishing the burn. My oooold Ricoh 6200S hated them at 2X, my Plextor 12/10/32S (i.e., the burner that could burn a CD on a soup-can lid hates them at 12X, my LiteOn 48X doesn't seem to like them...

Strangely, they work fairly well in my Sony DRU500A at 24X (!)... no other burner I've used them with has even been able to consistently work well.

Imation CMC's are 2nd in my list... I don't even bother buying free/cheap spindles if they have the CMC-spindle-look to 'em.

(I will say, they're great for fast copies of CDs that you want to make sure your friends go out and buy eventually!

Philips branded CMC (16x). Simply ugly at any spped (even on my old 4x Acer OEM). Only 2 of 10 disks were completely readable.

G

Justin42 wrote:I have an old spindle of 50 PNY 12X discs that I bought back when I got my first 12X burner (summer 2000) -- let's just say, despite the fact I have burned hundreds of CDs since, I still have about 25 of those PNY's.. they're the only CDR I've ever seen that manages to 'forget' everything you've burned on them within 5 minutes of finishing the burn. My oooold Ricoh 6200S hated them at 2X, my Plextor 12/10/32S (i.e., the burner that could burn a CD on a soup-can lid hates them at 12X, my LiteOn 48X doesn't seem to like them...

Strangely, they work fairly well in my Sony DRU500A at 24X (!)... no other burner I've used them with has even been able to consistently work well.

Imation CMC's are 2nd in my list... I don't even bother buying free/cheap spindles if they have the CMC-spindle-look to 'em.

(I will say, they're great for fast copies of CDs that you want to make sure your friends go out and buy eventually!

Oh yeah, I hate PNY's also. They are Ritek.

My 500a also burns to some old TDK usa made certified+ media I have that none of the Liteons I've had will write to properly. Kinda nice to be able to use them again if I want too.
The Sony may be based on a older burn engine for cd writing or it just makes better guesses with unknown media but the error rate was as good as my 52 with TY media.
The TDK 24x Sanyo burner I used to have would burn those OK at 20x.

i'd have to say te optimum cd-rs made by cmc. they burned fine and worked good but when i used nero cd speed's cd quality check on a optimum cd-r and a fujifilm cd-r that were burned at the same time (which was like 2 min b4 i checked them with cd-speed) i found 720 errors on the optimum cd-r while the fujifilm had 0 errors.

Ian wrote:

aviationwiz wrote:Imation Branded CMC is by far the worst. CMC sucks in general also.

Phillips CMC 40x are good.

I think the exact opposite. Of course, it really varies from batch to batch. Nothing like quality control, eh?

Right now the worst discs I have are some Maxell 40x manufactured by Ritek. I really regret buying them.

Ian: what was wrong with the Maxell 40x Ritek made media? I don't own any of this stuff--I use primarily Maxell CD-R Pro Taiyo Yuden made media, which is superb in quality like all other TY CD-R media. I thought that the Maxell branded Ritek's were at least OK--not that I would buy any media that is made by Ritek, CMC, or any other Taiwanese media company.

The worst media I used was media I tried once that I knew was cheap. Pacific Digital CD-Rs (6X certified I believe) from Best Buy. There was about 5 CD-Rs in the package I bought. These were the horrible ones that looked like double sided DVDs--you couldn't tell which side of the CD-R to put face down in the CD writer's tray because both sides looked like the read/write side! I should have returned them to the store right then and there. After trying to use them, I gave up quickly.

I have some discs made by CMC.

Suprisingly, these 3 different types of media have the same ATIP even though the quality is obviously worlds apart

This Disc is designed for CD-RW/COMBO Drive Only.
Disc Type, Material = CD-R, Phthalocyanine
ATIP Lead-in = 97m 26s 66f
Norminal Capacity = 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f)
Disc Manufacturer maybe = CMC,Imation
SMART-BURN Speed Limit = 48X

Verbatim Datalife (not plus) Crystal 24x
The label side feels sticky for some reason. I bought 10 pieces, they stuck to one another and i had to sort of pry them off one by one. They work ok at 8x, i only had a 8x burner (panasonic) when i bought these discs. I would say decent quality.

EDIT: I just discovered some bad files on my Verbatim discs. This sucks When I tried to open some bad gif files, Internet Explorer (my gif/jpeg program) said something about offline (?). Other good picture files work fine though.

Unbranded Discs (Labelled 40x by the store)
Silver top, silver bottom. My friend uses these garbage to pass me stuff. These don't work without errors at 32x and above. Impossible to remove fingerprints from the label side. He uses a Plextor 40/12/40 clone.

Unbranded Discs Part 2 (Labelled 40x by the store)
Another batch of wonderful silver top/bottom discs bought by my friend. These are total garbage. The discs are not even molded properly, bumps/impurtities can be seen. The middle of the discs look different from the Unbranded discs above, so they're probably churned out from different machines/plants. Why they have the same ATIP, I have no idea. Don't work at 32x and above.

GQ (Great Quality)

I bought 100 CompUSA/Hitachi Maxell discs. The quality isn't that great, and the corners of the label flake off easily too.

The worst would be some CompUSA-brand 16x colored CD-Rs. They burned OK, but some of them developed cracks in the hub area (not good if I want my drive to continue working!). Fortunately, none broke inside a drive.

I actually like Imation 32x CMCs. They have the best burn quality I have seen in any disc (they are good; my other discs (RiTEK, TY, etc) aren't bad).

The worst ones I got were a 10 pack of 12X GQ "Gold" CD's I bought at Fry's about 2 years ago- made by good old Lead Data. They would not burn at 12x, only 4X would work. I think I tossed half of them away. And they had the thinnest top layer I have seen. I only used them for making mix music CD's for my car player and they still play fine. The best ones they make are Sonys and Pro Media 32X.

My freind was at dollar tree this week and he picked up a 2-pack of "Starlogic" CD-Rs for a dollar each - these are also Lead Data's.

And I cant say enough bad things about CMC disks, the old 4X-16X with cayenne dye were really flaky. Cursor by Gigastorage, if you got these wet they woudnt play anymore. Im not a fan of Hitachi/Maxell CD-R's either. The quality is real hit and miss.

I think with the rapid ramping up of speeds the quality of even the cheapest CD-R companies has gotten better. I just wish every company had the quality of Tayio Uden.

BillyG wrote:And I cant say enough bad things about CMC disks, the old 4X-16X with cayenne dye were really flaky.

Hahahaha! Cayenne dye! Is that like Cayenne Pepper?

If they'd made the discs out of Cayenne they might have been better

Or maybe that was their secret; CMC type 0 discs were the media equivalent of Chicory/Coffee lol.

In my personal archive testing, I give 1 of 4 grades: Very Good, Good, Bad, or Very Bad. Very Good and Good are completely readable, and are diffrientiated by varying amounts of C1 errors. A bad rating is given to discs with a LOT of C1 errors, so that the disc has major trouble being read, or if C2 errors occur to the point of making it unreadable in most situations. Very Bad has unreadable portions on the disc that are not correctable under any circumstances, which usually occurs from very high C2 errors.

Let's see, so far the worst discs I've used are:

Memorex:
Appearence: Silver Background/Silver Writing - Labeled - 74min CD-R
Certified Speed: ? ("Multispeed")
Dye Type: Cyanine? (Smart burn can't tell, CD Doctor thinks Cyanine)
ATIP Lead-In: 97m 27s 61f
ATIP Lead-Out: 74m 50s 00f
Nominal Capacity: 657.42MB (74min)
Smart Burn Speed Limit: 32x
Manufacturer: Ricoh? (Tough to tell, it MIGHT be Ricoh)

11 out of 11 discs have scored "Very Bad"


BASF:
Appearence: Gold Background/Black Writing - Labeled - 74min CD-R
Certified Speed: ? ("Multispeed")
Dye Type: Cyanine
ATIP Lead-In: 97m 26s 60f
ATIP Lead-Out: 74m 50s 00f
Nominal Capacity: 658.89MB (74min)
Smart Burn Speed Limit: 32x
Manufacturer: CMC Magnetics

Out of 19 discs tested:
02 scored: Very Good
00 scored: Good
03 scored: Bad
14 scored: Very Bad

Those 2 disc types stand out the most for being bad in my testing, but I'll post some other's when I finish testing all my CD-Rs (It'll take me at least a week! I've only done the first 180 CD-Rs so far, and I've got at LEAST another 600 to go, probably more!!)

Darth wrote:I have some discs made by CMC.

Suprisingly, these 3 different types of media have the same ATIP even though the quality is obviously worlds apart

This Disc is designed for CD-RW/COMBO Drive Only.
Disc Type, Material = CD-R, Phthalocyanine
ATIP Lead-in = 97m 26s 66f
Norminal Capacity = 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f)
Disc Manufacturer maybe = CMC,Imation
SMART-BURN Speed Limit = 48X

Take a second look at the ATIP info, and see if the ATIP Lead-In *AND* the ATIP Lead-Out are the same.

This Disc is designed for CD-RW/COMBO Drive Only.
Disc Type, Material = CD-R, Phthalocyanine
ATIP Lead-in = 97m 26s 66f
Norminal Capacity = 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f) <----------
Disc Manufacturer maybe = CMC,Imation
SMART-BURN Speed Limit = 48X

The arrow points to the ATIP Lead-Out if you don't know what it is.

tlotz wrote:Ian: what was wrong with the Maxell 40x Ritek made media?

The writing quality is usually very poor if you write to them at anything faster than 32x.

worst ever?!?

hmmm...back in the day on my 2x & 4x HP writer.....memorex media. out of 24, I think only 4 or 5 worked.

more recently...the ValueDisc 200 pk from OM...figure my new Liteon drive would be more friendly to it....it just sped down the drive a lot. Not to mention they were butt ugly!