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I'm using 25 GB BD-R to back up files so I want to get some media that I can have some confidence in (and yet is not too expensive). I am burning at 8x with the Pioneer BDR-205 (fw:1.03) and checking the quality (error scan) with Samsung SH-B083L (fw: SB00) using the Opti Drive Control 1.48 software to do LDC and BIS error scans.

So far I am satisfied with Verbatim 4x Inkjet-printable (media ID: VERBATIMc ), which the BDR-205 can burn at 8x with good results. I tried scanning one disc, holding 22.74 GB at 1x (90 minutes) and at 8x (17 minutes).

1x scan (22.74 GB):
LDC: 6.80 / 267 (avg / max)
BIS: 0.11 / 5

8x scan (22.74 GB):
LDC: 11.70 / 185
BIS: 0.21 / 8

According to c't magazine http://www.heise.de/ct/ for a quality BD-R burn, the average LDC should stay below 13 and the maximum BIS should not exceed 8, so these results qualify as good. I also tried "VINPOWER DIGITAL" media (media ID: PHILIPR04 ) which still reads back without failures, but did not do nearly so well in the error scan, even when burned at 2x which is pretty slow. A huge error rate after the 17 GB mark resulted in:
LDC: 1105.66 / 9728
BIS: 85.41 / 768

The Samsung SH-B083L seems to be a better tester than Lite-On's BD drives. However, I'm still not sure how accurate it is. For example, if those results were truly that bad, the disc shouldn't have been readable.

For my BD burning, I've stuck to the big brands like TDK, Sony, Verbatim, etc. If we could get Panasonic here in the US, I'd probably buy those too. I've also been pretty impressed with MBI's 6x BD-R discs, but I'm not sure which companies are sellnig them.

I checked and Vinpower is selling discs from some company called Optical Quantum. I can't say that I've ever heard of them...

I have only done about 10 scans so far. I have no idea how the hardware & software really work internally, but the SH-B083L does seem to be measuring *something* which is consistent. When I scan the same disk again, I get roughly the same results. When I scan the Verbatim discs, they are almost always good in the sense of avg. LDC < 13 and max. BIS < 9 and the Vinpower / Optical Quantum discs are always awful after about the 17 GB point, so there is some problem there. (I just noticed there is a 1.08 firmware update for my burner, maybe that would help the burn quality).

> if those results were truly that bad, the disc shouldn't have been readable.

That may be true, but I suspect the OptiDrive software may be putting the drive into a different mode which is more sensitive to errors, when doing the error scan. When I put one of these "bad" disks in the same drive and do a speed test, the speed only drops to about 6x in the bad portion of the disc. Whereas, during the scan on the same disc, the speed frequently drops to 0.1x so it seems there is something different going on. All I can say is it seems to be measuring some real property of the disc, because each disc always measures about the same.

Ran into the same sort of things when I first started burning dvd disks, they'd test excellent and not play, or they'd test awful and play just fine so now testing is important for me but the best test is does it play in my pickiest player. Of course with my BD burns it's mainly does it play as I only have the burner in here and a first gen Panasonic BD-10a player, also I don't think my LG supports quality testing of BD media at all.

By the way: I wanted to see if I could get a better result on the cheaper media by upgrading my BDR-205 burner firmware to 1.08 (it shipped with 1.03). Major mistake! The flash process completed normally, but now the burner is doing 0.7x burns on BD-R (2 hours) and < 0.5x on BD-RE (over three hours!) I have tried to downgrade the firmware back to 1.04, but that doesn't work (firmware loader says "FW already at latest"). I've tried both ImgBurn and Nero 8, same results. Looks like the upgrade to 1.08 destroyed my BD-R burner

Note: during a burn, the indicated device buffer level fluctuates rapidly between 90% and 50%. Looks like the burner is somehow starved for data? But nothing changed on my side since when it worked fine on FW 1.03; I did the FW flash update and nothing else.

Maybe it got stuck in PIO mode since the flash and you need to remove the drive in device manager and let it re detect it so it can reset to UDMA 4 or whatever it supports?
It's happened to me before and that's about what happens. It also may have somehow gotten the verify data as it burns turned back on on whatever program your using to burn with, that will slow it right down too.

Yes, it looks like it is some kind of interface problem. I have the drive in an external USB/ESATA enclosure, and I was using the ESATA connection to my PC. I moved it over to my laptop, connecting with USB, used ImgBurn and got a 2.0x burn on a 2x Sony BD-RE, as expected for that particular media. I'll look into it more, but at least it appears the drive itself is working OK.

Your testing one disk at 8x while the other at 1x of course they will be different. For BD I use 4x to scan.