CDRLabs.com

After seeing the problems Ian has been having with Maxell-branded Ritek 40x media, I decided to do a few tests of my own. I have here some FWS-branded Ritek 48x media. FWS is a respected budget brand here in the UK, they started out making some very high quality budget DVDR media so there is no reason to believe these are especially bad examples -- indeed I've been hearing a fair few complaints recently about Ritek media and poor playback on some devices.

Anyway the results are here: http://jasejames.tripod.com/ritek.htm

All these results were written with a BTC 3212IM CD writer, and read back with a Traxdata Venus II (rebadged LiteOn 48/24/48 ), although very similar results are observed with all my other writers so the cheap'n'cheerful burner can't be blamed here.

At 32x write/48x read, the result is pitiful, similar to the sorts of results Ian has been getting. The C1 errors do jump up at the point the writer changes to 32x, but go off the scale after 60minutes. These discs are clearly not suited for 32x writing, or the burner is doing a bad job -- or so you'd think.

Have a look at the same disc read back at 8x. The error rate is not bad -- I'd say that's a good-to-very good burn in fact. Interesting for such an apparently bad burn above, don't you think?

So, I reduce the write speed to 24x. Same story. The disc isn't responding well to 32x writing, nor high-speed reading. It seems that the concentricity of the media is bad -- further out the drive is having problems tracking it, as opposed to it actually writing badly. Furthermore, the write speed doesn't seem to make much difference -- the fault is inherent in the media it seems.

It's a strange one. There really is no excuse for this from Ritek of all people. And the reason I post this is for Ian's benefit really, perhaps the Maxell results are invalid due to this media just not being manufactured properly?

I've had very mixed results with the Ritek media. Some of the Ritek manufactured TDK discs I've bought have been pretty good. Other TDK batches and the Maxells have not worked quite as well.

So what happens if you write to those discs at 12x or 16x and read them back at 48x? Do you get high errors at the end? I'm just wondering if those errors are due to high recording speeds or high read speeds.

It's the read speeds (although high write speeds probably have a similar effect on burn quality, 32x is not excessive). I've updated the page above with results from an 8x burn, and it's just the same. The C1 errors at 8x read-back are actually slightly higher than the 32x burn read at 8x, ironically

I had a similar experience w/ error-reporting discrepancies, but w/ a couple of Kodak Gold discs which I wanted to test.

My Teac 540 would show significantly more errors than the 512EB when reading the very same disc. The 540 reads quickly, the 512 slowly.

I was starting to lose faith in the legendary Kodak quality - and I figured maybe the 540 was just not such a hot reader.

Does this sound familiar?

It sounds like faster reading just might not give accurate error results. It may not even have to do with the particular media/brand. Or is this the first time this issue has popped up, w/ the Ritek media?