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I bought the Khypermedia 50 pack CD-R at OfficeMax this morning (Free after MIR). I also purchased the 100 pack Phillips from BestBuy ($6.99 after MIR). BestBuy had spindles made in China and Taiwan. I bought the ones from China since I've never had a spindle from there before. Both the Khypermedia and Phillips Made in China were identified as CMC Magnetics by Smartburn 3.1.6 and K-probe 1.1.23.

Does anyone know who makes the Phillips 100 pack from Taiwan? I don't think it was Ritek because they weren't in one of their characteristic spindle designs.

Jim

Once upon a time, Best Buy had a Philips 100 Pack on sale free
after rebate. They turned out to be the worst CMC discs I ever
used.
(They were made in Taiwan.)
I hope you have better luck than I did.

P.S.: I also have never come across Chinese discs.
Please let us know if these turn out to be one of the
'better' batches of CMC's.


Thanks!

I got the 50pk of value disc/kypermedia cdrs at officemax. I am running a test on one using nero cd speed. how do I determine the quality of the disc, how will I know if it is a low quality disc or not?

In Nero CD Speed, go to Extra pull-down menu then ScanDisc. That's one way to find out if the discs are good or not. If all the blocks are green after ScanDisc completes, the disc is fine. If any of the blocks are yellow, it's not so good. If any of the block are red (except for the last one), it's definitely not good.

all green on the scandisc test. is there a way to test if the discs are ok to burn vcds on?

It may be a long time into the future before we see any Taiwanese discs again considering the way China is looming over them with threats of war.

thetiger wrote:all green on the scandisc test. is there a way to test if the discs are ok to burn vcds on?

If they'll burn data, then they'll burn video. Why wouldn't they? Just don't put too much data on the disc or it won't fit, and make sure whichever CD/DVD player you use to play the VCD is compatible with the disc. Only one way to find out, try it!

By the way, what burner did you burn this disc with?

Ok, here is a burn of a 798 meg VCD (79:36.43) with Nero 5.5.10.54 at 52x with the Chinese Phillips (CMC) discs. I always seem to have a spike towards the end of all my discs. It is a lot less pronounced using TY, but still present.

K-probe only reached ~33x max while scanning the disc even though it was set to max.

Jim wrote:K-probe only reached ~33x max while scanning the disc even though it was set to max.

The LiteOn drives are limited to 32x on video CDs. I ran into this quite a while ago. See this post: http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=8806. Other than that, those are better results than I've seen on any CMC's on my LTR48246S.

G

MediumRare wrote:The LiteOn drives are limited to 32x on video CDs. I ran into this quite a while ago. See this post: http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=8806.

I didn't know that about video CDs. Thanks for sharing that link. I've learned so much from this site.

Jim

Jim wrote:I've learned so much from this site.

Jim

So have I!!

G

Thanks for posting your results Jim!

While I am also learning a lot from this site, my technical knowledge
is still lacking - do your results imply that these Chinese CMC's are
almost decent?

These discs seem to be the best CMC discs I've used. TY's are the best in my drive with most discs never exceeding 0.2xx C1 errors average. Ritek works next best in my experience.

Although I just burnt this data disc at 52x on one of the Chinese CMC discs and got these results with K-probe.

That looks more like the CMC's I'm used to. Very large variance in quality within the same package. TY and RiTEK (and Verbatim/MCC) have been very good for me too. You might want to add your results to the Media Compatibility Thread.
Incidentally, if you save your KProbe scans as png files, they'll be a lot smaller than bmp's without loss of quality (be gentle to us 56k modem plebes ).

G

Jim: As MediumRare pointed out, feel free to add any further results to the Media Compatibility Thread! I'm sure you have experiences with other discs aside from these CMC's. Oh, don't forget to please post results for the Media Compatibility Thread from Nero CD Speed's ScanDisc, not KProbe.

I didn't even think to look at whether there were any options besides .BMP in K-probe. File sizes used to bother me too before broadband became available here. Now it's easy to forget about. I will post all future scans in .PNG format.

I'll also post some results in the compatibility thread with Scandisc.

Jim