Has anyone used this brand, apparently they claim theirs is Premium range

Taiyo Yuden Shiny Silver Thermal 8X DVD+R Media

I would like to know which is the best blank DVD media (normal/premium). Right now we have

1. Sony
2. Verbatim
3. Maxell
4. Company brands (Office Depot, Staples etc)
5. Taiyo Yuden (Available through Supermediastore.com)

Has there been a consensus on the best brand in Media. I use a Toshiba DR-400 seems to be handling both DVD+R and -R with ease. Just worried about the right brand! Thought it would be a good idea to vote off on it...

TY first, Verbs second, Sony if you can't find the first 2, forget the rest.

Has anyone used this brand, apparently they claim theirs is Premium range

Taiyo Yuden Shiny Silver Thermal 8X DVD+R Media

I would like to know which is the best blank DVD media (normal/premium). Right now we have

1. Sony
2. Verbatim
3. Maxell
4. Company brands (Office Depot, Staples etc)
5. Taiyo Yuden (Available through Supermediastore.com)

Has there been a consensus on the best brand in Media. I use a Toshiba DR-400 seems to be handling both DVD+R and -R with ease. Just worried about the right brand! Thought it would be a good idea to vote off on it...

i voted verbatim as ive heard good stuff about them but ive never used them. i use whatever is on sale at staples (sony or memorex) or radio shack(usually tdk).

on:
2 tosh dr2s
pan es15

TY first, Verbs second, Sony if you can't find the first 2, forget the rest.

i didn't know there was such a big difference between the brands. can i ask why those 3 are the only ones worth buying?

The problem with a thread/vote like this is the status of all of this media is in flux all the time. If we all vote and say "TY, then Verbatim, then Sony", and suddenly Verbatim starts selling absolute garbage, people will come back and complain "But all of you swore by it!!"

Media is absolutely a moving target. What is great this week might very well be utter crap next week. (TDK used to be spectacular... now it's garbage)

For price and reliable quality, I prefer printable 8X Taiyo Yuden, which I buy at supermediastore when they are on sale.

i didn't know there was such a big difference between the brands. can i ask why those 3 are the only ones worth buying?
TYs and Verbs scan very well after burning, and don't appear to degrade as much over time into unplayability, unlike other brands. Sonys are considered pretty decent and are available everywhere.
but like jimscott42 said, that could all change tomorrow, but I'd still stick with those 3 for the time being.

It will also vary radically from burner to burner. My Lite-On LOVES Taiyo/Sony 16x-R. For some reason my Optiarc gives exceptionally low PI errors and PI Failures with these,but there will often be one lone spike PI Failure that is between a 5-7.
My Sylvania HDRV200F gives "OK" burns with Taiyo 8x -R (and all other -Rs) but stellar burns with Verbatim 16x-R. The Optiarc LOVES the New Verbatim 16x-R's a lot! My Samsung TSST burner is a piece of crap that gives fairly poor burns with ALL media. Wish I had never bought it.:mad:

From what I've read at AVS it would be:
Ty's, Verbs followed by Sony.
Note I said from what I've read online, personally I have all Panasonic standalone recorders and have never really had problems with any discs(except +R discs which search odd on Panasonics)
I have used Maxell, Philips, Office Depot, Verbs, TDK and Sony. Lately I've been getting great deals on Office Depot media. Maybe time will tell, but for now even my 3 year old -R discs are playing fine. Note I do NOT buy Memorex media. I hated them for Audio and Video tapes(awful quality) and wouldn't want to risk them with DVD media. Other than that I try and stick to only "name brand" media, with the exception of OD media, which seems to work just fine.

I dunno, but I have even done OfficeMax DVD-Rs in my recorder, and it took just like a big brand DVD would. That surprised me...since OfficeMax usually makes their DVD-Rs with PC data in mind, nice to know that they're also great with TV recordings. Anybody know who makes the DVDs for them? I mean, I know it's a store branded pack, but not too sure if a big brand was behind them, tho.

I mean, you'd never think that a store that caters to home office, businesses, or professionals would also cater to a home theater enthusiast in disguise. Seems like it's sold for one purpose, but found used for something completely different.

CMC makes the OfficeMax discs, CMC is not great quality, the only exceptions are the Verbs made by CMC, those are made with Mitsubishi's dyes and stampers and are very good.

Do you know who makes Office Depot? Please don't tell me Memorex:eek:

Memorex doesn't make ANY discs, which is the problem with them-- they buy discs from whoever sells them the cheapest so they can sell them to the price-motivated big box stores.

Blank DVDs are all the same thing, too-- a good disc is a good disc, whether it's sold by an office store for data or a big box store for a DVD recorder. It's all bits when it's on the disc. :) (and hopefully you have a good disc so the bits stay on the disc. ;) )

But yeah, most of the generics are CMC (if you're lucky) or one of many dozens of lower grade manufacturers. The problem with CMC is they're sooooo incredibly variable. You might get a stack of discs that are nearly Verbatim quality (but maybe one disc in the manufacturing batch failed Verbatim's QA process so the whole spindle gets marked down to lower grade), or you'll get a stack of shiny silver discs that look like a DVD but your drive won't even recognize them. ;)

Check videohelp.com's media reviews for some information about whatever discs you have-- but know that many brands vary, so whoever made Office Depot discs in 2006 is probably irrelevant to who makes them today.

From what I've read at AVS it would be:
Ty's, Verbs followed by Sony.
Note I said from what I've read online, personally I have all Panasonic standalone recorders and have never really had problems with any discs(except +R discs which search odd on Panasonics)
I have used Maxell, Philips, Office Depot, Verbs, TDK and Sony. Lately I've been getting great deals on Office Depot media. Maybe time will tell, but for now even my 3 year old -R discs are playing fine. Note I do NOT buy Memorex media. I hated them for Audio and Video tapes(awful quality) and wouldn't want to risk them with DVD media. Other than that I try and stick to only "name brand" media, with the exception of OD media, which seems to work just fine.
slightly ot: its 'funny' u mention memorex audio tapes. cassettes?
i recorded (copied) hundreds of (now classic) rock lps back in the '70s onto memorex mxr2 and mxr3 cassettes, my hobby at the time, with a now 32 yr old nakamichi 600 recorder.
the sq was pretty decent, imo, but over the years the foam pads that keep the tape on the playback head fell out of the shells rendering the tapes unplayable. i even tried putting 1/8" slices of cigarette filters in to replace the pads; they worked but not well.

then about 5 years ago i had a brainstorm and bought a 6pack of maxell c90 ud tapes. the shells are the screw type.
i cracked open the memorex shells, extracted the recorded tape, carefully layed it into an opened up maxell shell (after dumping the blank tape), replaced internal friction pads and screwed on the top, and

voila!, fully 'restored' 30+ yr old audio cassettes:eek::)!

so then i 'restored' the several hundred other memorex and other tapes.
surprisingly, most of these old tapes have retained most of the sq from back in the day. the nak 600 was also restored 3 yrs ago and plays nicely.
an aphex exciter helps out with the few tapes that have lost some of the high freqs.

Alright continuing on that vein, the Memorex audio cassettes I were referring to were also MRX3. They sounded like crap on my Sony TC-555 at the time. I put them away planning on never using them again. Well once I got my Nakamichi ZXL-700 which auto calibrated every cassette for bias, I tried the Memorex tapes again. Low and behold with the Nak the tapes actually sounded OK. I still kinda dread having used them, since I also had problems with the pad, and also the shell tended to make a irritating noise as the tape played. Rewinding and FF also made a AWFUL squealing noise. The case must have been so cheap, not to mention the tape itself must have been out of spec, and without a machine like the Nak., that auto calibrated the tape, they gave awful recordings.
Sorry Anon812, for the OT chatter:D Westgates Nakamichi comment got me going:rolleyes:
Nakamichi made recordings on cassette that rivaled reel to reel. One hell of a company. No holes barred Quality at it's best!:cool:

I burn many DVDs, all in the DVD-R format, on my Panasonic DVD recorders and combo recorders. My most frequently used brands are TDK, Maxell, and Verbatim, all have proven trouble-free. In recent months I have purchased 400 TDKs (I have just opened the last spindle of these) 400 Maxells (two spindles are still sealed) and 200 Verbatims (both spindles are still sealed).

I haven't used Memorex discs since early 2007 when I found one in every six discs proved defective when used across several Panasonics. I discarded the remainder of one spindle of 100 discs and returned another spindle of 100 discs for a refund. I switched back to TDK discs and the problems dissappeared.

Huh... Out of those brands, I'm surprised nobody brought up TDK, I have some CD-Rs from them, and wondering if their quality is nearly as impressive in the DVD column. Anyone have any experience with TDK in the DVD department? I've used CDs, and made VCD/SVCD recordings with those on my HTPC already, but not too sure how good their DVDs would be for a standalone.

I think F.Y.E. sells a lot of their discs, that's why I brought them up.

Huh... Out of those brands, I'm surprised nobody brought up TDK...
TDK no longer makes their own consumer DVDs. In the 3rd Qtr of 2007, Imation bought TDK Recording Media and Memcorp (Memorex). Imation farms out a lot of mfg to CMC Magnetics and Optodisc who often, but not always, make landfill material. Older TDKs might be Ok but new mfg might be "suspect."

I've used strictly Taiyo Yuden Premium DVD-R (first 4X and now 8x, never 16x) for over 2.5 years. Not a single coaster burned nor a single disk that won't play in any player I've had. I've had older DVD players that wouldn't recognize some brands of DVD-R or play others without skipping or freezing. T-Y plays perfectly on these machines.

I won't even consider using anything else. My signature says it all.

TYs and Verbs scan very well after burning, and don't appear to degrade as much over time into unplayability, unlike other brands. Sonys are considered pretty decent and are available everywhere.
but like jimscott42 said, that could all change tomorrow, but I'd still stick with those 3 for the time being.

thanks for the explanation

IIRC, weren't Verbs and HPs made by the same manufacturer? I know that Hewlett-Packard branded DVDs seem to have the same stuff, like LightScribe-based DVDs, and even the regular ones seem to have some similarities.

They can be made by the same company but have very different properties-- CMC makes a LOT of media. They make some of the best media on the market, when they make Verbatim media-- as they use Verbatim equipment, Verbatim dyes, and are held to Verbatim's quality assurance standards. They also make some of the worst media on the market.

Just like many companies, they have a whole product line from "cheap garbage" to "premium". Even TY has a "value" line which are fairly good discs although when I bought 200 of them, about 75% had visible defects in the dye. Honestly, even with those problems, the TY discs had better quality scans than most normal discs, except for spikes where the dye problems were. Even then I don't use them all that much as I don't fully trust them.

There are also other factors, such as age of the stamping equipment, dyes used, etc-- when the stampers are brand new they make better discs than older stampers (That put the patterns in that the dye fills in). So as they age the discs are relegated to lower class media.

It's kind of like how Ford makes both the Focus and the Jaguar-- just cause Ford "makes" both of those cars doesn't mean there are any similarities between the high end and low end. ;)

I have never used Tys. I use mainly -Rs. Within the past two years:

I have used probably 800+ Verbatims, with one coaster. Many of those were MAP6! One that later wouldn't play on one player, but would play on others.

I have used ~ 200 Sonys, no coasters.

I have used ~ 200 Maxells, one coaster.

I have used ~ 50 Verb +R DLs, no coasters.

I have used ~ 25 Verb -RWs, no coasters.

I have used ~ 50 Maxell -RWs, no coasters.

I have used ~ 25 +R Verbs, no coasters.

Now I stick to Verbs, but if I ever see any -R DLs on sale, ANY brand, I'll buy them, and try them!

I have used and been happiest with:

DVD-R 8X TAIYO YUDEN WHITE INKJET HUB PRINTABLE (http://www.blankmedia.ca/proddetail3.asp?id=302)
DVD-R 16X TAIYO YUDEN WHITE INKJET HUB PRINTABLE (http://www.blankmedia.ca/proddetail3.asp?id=554)
DVD-R 16X TAIYO YUDEN SILVER INKJET HUB PRINTABLE (http://www.blankmedia.ca/proddetail3.asp?id=555)
DVD-R 16X TAIYO YUDEN GLOSSY INKJET - WATERSHIELD (http://www.blankmedia.ca/proddetail3.asp?id=1148)

I've usually been using Sony, Verb, Maxell, HP, OfficeMax, and TDK, and to me, Verbatim is probably one of the only brands that I've used, that was flawless throughout the whole spindle. Heck, I even tried the once generic stuff from Circuit City, ESA or whatever those were. Heh... You buy cheap, you get cheap. Not even ONE of those DVDs would do a thing. Those were just begging to be coasters. So, yeah, I think that Sony and Verb are the ones to go with.

The Verbatim and Ty discs seem to hold up quite well. The trick is to see which type burns best with your burner. Testing different discs with this program will save you a lot of grief down the road: http://www.cdspeed2000.com/download.html

Burn a movie, then use CD Speed to evaluate. Set the speed to 4X and go with the disc that gives a minimum score of 90. It is a good idea to run tests with every new batch of DVD media.

One should note that not all burners are capable of performing these quality tests.

Also, not every drive that can do the testing gives good results-- Pioneer burners are notorious for being HORRIBLE quality scanners. LiteOns, some Sonys, most? Plextors, Benq, and a few others are pretty consistently good quality scanners.

Don't necessarily go by quality scores-- I've seen discs that have high scores be what I would consider barely acceptable (maybe not "low quality" but not where they should be)-- it has to be a pretty horrendous burn to go below like 80 or so. ;)

Check the PIE (PI Errors) and PIF (PI Failures) maximum and average values-- PIE should not go above 280, and PIF should not go above 4. If either of those scores have small "spikes" it's probably ok but you should play the disc to verify. If you have a large part of the disc with values over those (looking at the chart) you should consider it a coaster, even if it plays. The DVD spec only "guarantees" playability if the numbers stay below those values, so if the disc degrades at all it could become unplayable very quicky.

(but even then there's always the exception of a player that will play anything, or a player that will take a perfectly acceptable disc and choke on it-- these are rules of thumb and this is very, very much an art and not a science! We wouldn't debate media so much if it were easy. ;) ) Lower's obviously better; I have no problem with getting PIE averages around 10-20, and PIF averages under 1, using good media. I start worrying about a disc if the PIE values hover much over 50; that's well below the 280 margin but well over what I normally see. Again, using good media gives good results.

And of course, a quality scan tells you what THAT specific drive says about THAT specific disc at THAT specific moment. Scan it again and it might be different. That said a bad disc will never become good, unless your DVD drive is failing! You have to look at quality scans as a process; I tend to save my charts that Plextools creates and once in a while re-scan a disc just to see if things are changing much (to look for degradation or the like). Haven't seen many issues on good media, but bad media does start failing fast. (I had a spindle of JVC discs that they burned great, scanned great, and 50% of the discs were unreadable in under 6 months.)

a lady on this forum years ago posted that she recorded the Winter Olympics in Feb. on TDKs on a brand new Panny, when she went to watch them in April, the discs were unplayable already.

a lady on this forum years ago posted that she recorded the Winter Olympics in Feb. on TDKs on a brand new Panny, when she went to watch them in April, the discs were unplayable already.

What the lady probably failed to mention was that she let her kids leave the discs on the dashboard of the car after they slopped their lunch all over them. That kind of deterioration simply doesn't happen without cause.

Check the PIE (PI Errors) and PIF (PI Failures) maximum and average values-- PIE should not go above 280, and PIF should not go above 4. If either of those scores have small "spikes" it's probably ok but you should play the disc to verify. If you have a large part of the disc with values over those (looking at the chart) you should consider it a coaster, even if it plays. The DVD spec only "guarantees" playability if the numbers stay below those values, so if the disc degrades at all it could become unplayable very quicky.



JM, I have been wondering about the occasional solitary PI Failure spike, and what it means overall.

Using a Hauppauge PCI Tuner/Recorder Card I am recording Cable TV now. After processing the video with ULEAD DVDMovie Studio I am burning Taiyo+R and Verbatim-R DVDs that will scan absolutely stellar - Very low PI error avg and Very low PI Failure avg, with the exception of 1 or 2 widely separated PI Failure Spikes of 5-7. Any idea what is causing this? How concerned should I be? The DVDs seem to play perfectly at the moment, but these are sporting events that will not likely be available for recording again later.

Also, not every drive that can do the testing gives good results...I agree 100% with everything posted here.

...she recorded the Winter Olympics in Feb. on TDKs on a brand new Panny, when she went to watch them in April, the discs were unplayable already.This could be a bit misleading, because it implies the discs degraded significantly in only a couple of months. In fact, we have no idea if the discs were playable right after they were burned. And even if they were playable, it says nothing about how many correctable errors there were and how close the disc was to being unreadable right from day one.

I quality scan every disk I burn and discard/reburn any that are subpar. In all my experience, none of the discs I've kept has shown significant degradation - that's in over two years of periodic testing of every disc.

Mind you I HAVE seen significant degradation of disks that were badly burned to start with. So if you're concerned about longevity, the moral is to equip your computer with software and a drive that can do quality scans and use it. If you don't you have absolutely no idea how good the burn is, since the built-in error correcting codes can make poorly burned discs that are a hair's breadth from being unreadable appear to play perfectly.

JM, I have been wondering about the occasional solitary PI Failure spike, and what it means overall.

Using a Hauppauge PCI Tuner/Recorder Card I am recording Cable TV now. After processing the video with ULEAD DVDMovie Studio I am burning Taiyo+R and Verbatim-R DVDs that will scan absolutely stellar - Very low PI error avg and Very low PI Failure avg, with the exception of 1 or 2 widely separated PI Failure Spikes of 5-7. Any idea what is causing this? How concerned should I be? The DVDs seem to play perfectly at the moment, but these are sporting events that will not likely be available for recording again later.

Are you burning at 16X (or faster)? Are the spikes always around the same places? When most DVD burners burn at high speeds they actually "Ramp up" and burn at 3 different speeds, getting faster as they go-- so like it'll start at 8X, go to 12X for a while, and then top off at 16X at the end. The drive has to stop burning and speed up and then restart-- sometimes drives (Especially older ones) don't quite handle this restarting process totally right and you'll get a little set of errors where the speedup happened.

Each disc (of one type) should have the same basic burn pattern so if you're seeing it consistently at the same places that's probably it-- try to upgrade your burner's firmware if you can, it might help. (this is also a good reason to stay burning at 8X or lower-- for 99% of drives this results in a burn at one constant speed, no stopping/restarting/etc-- at least for my superstitions that's better than inviting any opportunity for a glitch!)

If the spikes are random, not sure what to tell you except try different media. That said, some brands of discs give me occasional >4 PIF spikes but they're normally fine. (Sony is one that comes to mind-- very good burns overall but almost every burn has a single small spike to like 5 PIF). Just keep an eye on the discs, like I said, the standard says small spikes are fine (as long as it's playable!!), it's when a disc is consistently over the values you really have to worry.

Thanks JM, I will try reburning the same Image File at 8x and see what I get. The Spikes do seem to come at a similar point, usually about the start of 2nd third and start of the final third of the burn. Overall the PI errors and PI Failures are among the lowest of any discs I have ever burned, but have the 1-2 spikes that hit 5-7 and kinda worried me.

This one had 1 spike to 7 and 2 spikes to 5 (all separated) but overall very low errors. I reburned and got a better outcome with different media on this one.

Date : 2/21/2008 2:05:58 AM
Model : 2-0-0-0 L:LITE-ON DVDRW SHM-165P6S MS0P
Disc : DVD+R , YUDEN000T02 [Taiyo Yuden Company Limited]
Speed : 4x
ECC blocks sum (PI/PIF) : 8/1
Scanned range : 0 - 2285844
Sampling count : 120466
Errors : 0
PI Max : 27
PI Average : 0.72
PI Total : 12448
PIF Max : 7
PIF Average : 0.01
PIF Total : 245

What the lady probably failed to mention was that she let her kids leave the discs on the dashboard of the car after they slopped their lunch all over them. That kind of deterioration simply doesn't happen without cause.

If she had tried to play them right after burning them, she probably would have got the same result. Every time I burn a TDK or store brand or anything with a CMC id, it goes straight to the coaster bin. I must be insane wasting my time trying because the result is always the same. Verbs and TYs work every time and playback on all players.

I'm favoring Verbatim and Taiyo Yuden these days, though I've used a lot of Sony, Maxell and Fuji with very, very few coasters. Couple of my failed burns seemed to be related to some sort of corruption of the file on my DMR-E85's hard drive. But for the small price diff between off-brand or generic blanks and the TY/Verbatim/Sony stuff, it's not worth risking a bad burn to save a few cents.....

I've had good luck w/ FUJI's...although I just bought 100 Verbs on sale $24.99, couldn't pass on the price. It seems that most everyone likes them here....

I've had good luck w/ FUJI's...although I just bought 100 Verbs on sale $24.99, couldn't pass on the price. It seems that most everyone likes them here....

I seem to get better burns from more different burners with the Verbatim 16x -R than from Taiyo Premium 8x and 16x-R or Taiyo 8x and 16x+R Blanks. My LiteOn loves the Taiyo+R, but honestly all my burners give better results from Verbatim-R for me than from Taiyo-R.......................

I've used 100+ Sony (MIJ) -R and 100+ Verbatim -R in my Toshiba XS machines with zero coasters. Well over 1000 TY -R 4X and 8X value and premium lines with two coasters. Funny, both coasters were with the TY 8X premium.:confused:

Some of the TYs were 3 years old, partially filled and unfinalized. Others were recorded and finalized in different replacement burners sitting on top of different open Toshibas. Needless to say, I'm sticking with TY.

Taiyo Yuden has the best quality because they are made in Japan. I purchased them at www.runtechmedia.com

I only use Taiyo Yuden 8X TYG02s on my Toshiba RD-XS units and I don't ever recall a bad disk or coaster. I reckoned I've run through 500 DVD-Rs by now.

I only use Taiyo Yuden DVD-RAM too. Before I'd only use Taiyo's own brand (That's), which you can only get in Japan I believe. But since I have a hard time finding it in Okinawa, I've found the Victor-JVC and premium Maxell line appear to be TY DVD-RAM (at least in Japan). Initialization time on virgin disks are identical to That's brand. I've tried TDK and Panasonic DVD-RAM in the past with maybe a 40-60% success rate. At $22 a pop for 10 disks, finding usable disks that way can get expensive.

Check out this link and see what these guys use ;):

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f33/