[Westly-C]

Just a heads up for anyone who has used Maxell blank DVDs, you may want to check discs you burned years ago. After going thru a few disc boxes, I saw several of mine had become 'cloudy' on the top. These were made back in 2004, and hadn't, seen much play since getting tucked away. The bottoms were clear. Copied them to newer discs. They played back without issues, but made new copies just to be on the safe side.

So, give your collection a good looking over whenever you have the time.

 

[Kelson]

When you say "top" I presume you mean the label side or non-recording side. Is that correct?

 

[JMas]

I have a lot recorded on Maxell 4x DVD-Rs with a gold label. I presume you are not talking about these.

 

[Westly-C]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelson  /t/1423655/maxell-discs-turning-cloudy-on-the-surface#post_22287463


When you say "top" I presume you mean the label side or non-recording side. Is that correct?

lol, Yes, the label side.

 

 

Quote:
jmas said
I have a lot recorded on Maxell 4x DVD-Rs with a gold label. I presume you are not talking about these.

No these are 16x discs, and the color is copper, not the bright yellow/gold of the 4x and -RWs discs Maxell sold.

 

Here's what it looks like.

 

[tomwil]

My 2004-era Maxell Made In Japan 8X with the gold label surface (same color as above ^^^) also gets cloudy. But on mine, it appears it is similar to tarnish from finger prints and such, and seems to wipe off, removing the cloudiness and restoring a gleaming surface.

 

[jjeff]

I also have many of those Maxell -R DVDs but mine are 8x. I haven't seen clouding on the top but I did have clouding on the bottom of one of my Maxells. Unfortunately it was a one of a kind Hi8mm tape transfer where I had erased the original. It would skip and lock badly during a 5 minute area. It was so bad I couldn't do a computer copy so I had to realtime copy. Out of my 2 dozen or so players and recorders I found one that played the bad area 90% of the way through so I used that for the player. After this experience I computer copied all my one of a kind DVDs although this was the only one I seemed to have issues with.

 

[Kelson]

Wes, if that clouding doesn't wipe off like tomwil's disks, then that looks suspiciously like the edge seal of the disk has failed.

 

[Church AV Guy]



Quote:
No these are 16x discs, and the color is copper, not the bright yellow/gold of the 4x and -RWs discs Maxell sold.

If it is the edge seal, then I would expect the data layer to start degrading very quickly. It doesn't tolerate exposure to oxygen very well at all.


For the record, I made a hundred or so DVDs for a "project" and they supplied the blank media, the bright yellow painted 4x Maxell -R disks. In the time since I made these disks (I can't remember they were made, my mind is fuzzy...

) they have ALL failed. Every one of them has become unplayable.

 

[Westly-C]



Quote:
Originally Posted by tomwil  /t/1423655/maxell-discs-turning-cloudy-on-the-surface#post_22288774


My 2004-era Maxell Made In Japan 8X with the gold label surface (same color as above ^^^) also gets cloudy. But on mine, it appears it is similar to tarnish from finger prints and such, and seems to wipe off, removing the cloudiness and restoring a gleaming surface.

Never thought of trying to wipe them off-I'd rubbed my fingers across once to see if it smeared, but when it didn't and nothing appeared on my fingers, I just assumed those were going bad. Some were kept in individual dvd cases, and a few were in spindles. The cloudy ones in the spindle didn't leave anything on the bottom of the burned disc that was on top of it, plus I handle my discs carefully so I didn't think it was due to grease from touching them on the top. Those photos don't show how faded the cloudy ones (Space 1999) looks verses the normal (Starship Troopers) disc color.

Thanks for the suggestion though. .

 

[7558037]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Church AV Guy  /t/1423655/maxell-discs-turning-cloudy-on-the-surface#post_22289452


For the record, I made a hundred or so DVDs for a "project" and they supplied the blank media, the bright yellow painted 4x Maxell -R disks. In the time since I made these disks (I can't remember they were made, my mind is fuzzy...

) they have ALL failed. Every one of them has become unplayable.

 

If you could add a date, at least year, in your orig. post, that would provide one more anecdotal piece of info in the "How long will my discs last?" question... at least in regards to the 2nd tier discs.

 

[doswonk1]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Church AV Guy  /t/1423655/maxell-discs-turning-cloudy-on-the-surface#post_22289452


For the record, I made a hundred or so DVDs for a "project" and they supplied the blank media, the bright yellow painted 4x Maxell -R disks. In the time since I made these disks (I can't remember they were made, my mind is fuzzy...

) they have ALL failed. Every one of them has become unplayable.

Uh-oh......I gotta check some discs when I get home tonight.

 

[DigaDo]

Here are some CDs, most of which will no longer play. These were on a spindle left on a shelf near a window out in our garage. Notice that the label and media surface on the Memorex CD is largely missing.

MEMOREX CD-R WITH LABEL FLAKING OFF WITH PARTIAL MEDIA SURFACE MISSING.JPG 126k .JPG file

MORE CD-Rs FROM SPINDLE IN GARAGE.JPG 247k .JPG file

 

[Church AV Guy]



Quote:
Originally Posted by wajo  /t/1423655/maxell-discs-turning-cloudy-on-the-surface/0_100#post_22289813

Quote:
Originally Posted by Church AV Guy  /t/1423655/maxell-discs-turning-cloudy-on-the-surface#post_22289452


For the record, I made a hundred or so DVDs for a "project" and they supplied the blank media, the bright yellow painted 4x Maxell -R disks. In the time since I made these disks (I can't remember they were made, my mind is fuzzy...

) they have ALL failed. Every one of them has become unplayable.

If you could add a date, at least year, in your orig. post, that would provide one more anecdotal piece of info in the "How long will my discs last?" question... at least in regards to the 2nd tier discs.

If I could have remembered it, I would have added it. Unfortunately, I was doing a great deal of this kind of thing, and I can't say with any certainty at all from my memory.

Darn bad memory...

Okay, I was able to get one or two of them to load enough to look at the files on the disk, if not play them. Some of them had obviously bogus dates attached (unreadable), but some others were date stamped in July of 2005, so maybe they weren't 4x disks. I seem to remember a project with those yellow painted top Maxell disks as 4x, but this project was for real-time dubs, not to the HDD at all, so I can't really say for sure. At any rate, these yellow top Maxell disks from July 2005 are all unreadable. How long they have been that way is impossible to say, except that they are VERY unreadable now (some won't even load), so I can assume that they have been slowly degrading over time, so they might have been "bad" for a while.

 

[jjeff]

The only "yellow" top Maxell discs I've used were 2x -RW discs that preformed very well from ~'05-'09 when I got my first HDD DVDR at which point my RW use dropped dramatically. My only other Maxell DVDs were the gold top ones that looked quite nice but I did have that issue with one. I think out of all my RWs I only had one fail after ~30 rewrites for each disc.

 

[JMas]

I have had very good luck with Maxell 4x gold-top DVD-Rs in terms of longevity. I still have several spindles that I haven't used yet. Some show a Taiyo Yuden ID. Can anybody who is reporting problems with their Maxell discs get an ID showing who really manufactured them?

 

[Westly-C]


DVD Identifier shows mine to be Prodisc F02

 

Quote:
Unique Disc Identifier : [DVD-RrodiscF02]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Disc & Book Type :       [DVD-R] - [DVD-R]

Manufacturer Name :      [Prodisc Technology Inc.]

Manufacturer ID :        [ProdiscF02]

Blank Disc Capacity :    [2,298,496 Sectors = 4.71 GB (4.38 GiB)]

 

 

[jjeff]

My 8x Maxell gold top -R discs show: Manufacturer ID: RITEKG05

My 2x Maxell yellow top -R discs show: Manufacturer ID: OPTODISCW002

I have no 4x gold tops.

 

[Kelson]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Church AV Guy  /t/1423655/maxell-discs-turning-cloudy-on-the-surface/0_100#post_22290720


If I could have remembered it, I would have added it. Unfortunately, I was doing a great deal of this kind of thing, and I can't say with any certainty at all from my memory.

Darn bad memory...

.

Burn longevity -- this is an interesting topic I have not thought about in a while. I got into the habit, from the very beginning, of writing the recording date on all my burned disks. I keep an Excel spreadsheet that catalogs the titles, the date burned, the burn speed and the media that was burned. So I went into it last night and did a sort to see what my earliest burns were -- I too used Maxell yellow-top 4x disks in the beginning, along with Ritek and Memorex, until I converted to Taiyo Yuden. I only ever used DVD-R -- no DVD+R -- and DVD+DL. I should note that all my burns were done with PC burners. Even though the editing features of the Panasonic recorders were top-notch, they just never could compare with PC editing/authoring tools so I just burned the recordings to RAM and sneaker-netted them over to my PC for processing.


My very first spindle of disks were Memorex 4X DVD-R that I burned in 7/04 - 8/04; my next spindle were the yellow-top Maxell 4X DVD-R that I burned in 8/04 - 12/04 -- these will be some nice 8 yr data points. I didn't have a chance to pull a sample of them from the storage boxes and do a PC rip to see if they still were good. I'll see if I can shake some time tonight to check them and get the media ID's. I admit to being very curious myself. A PC rip is more demanding than just seeing if it will play in a player. While a DVD player will let corrupt bits slide -- you may not even notice the brief macro blocking -- a PC rip will abort if the severity of the errors exceed the error-correction capabilities. Also with a PC rip I'm covering the entire disk and not just playing the first 20 min of the title or playing random points from chapter skip.


I'll see if I can rip these tonight. Although I really don't care about the specific 8 yr old recordings any more (sound familiar), I'm really curious how the disks have survived.

 

[ti-triodes]

I just did a quick visual check of 12 discs recorded in '04-'05. I can verify some clouding that won't wipe off. This is on the gold colored 8x discs, the yellow discs (4x?) all look fine. I didn't have time to play any yet although I'm not getting a good feeling about this.

 

[Kelson]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelson  /t/1423655/maxell-discs-turning-cloudy-on-the-surface/0_100#post_22292179


Burn longevity -- this is an interesting topic I have not thought about in a while . . . I too used Maxell yellow-top 4x disks in the beginning, along with Ritek and Memorex . . . I should note that all my burns were done with PC burners.

I'll see if I can rip these tonight. Although I really don't care about the specific 8 yr old recordings any more (sound familiar), I'm really curious how the disks have survived.

Here are some more anecdotal data points. Using ImgBurn, I ripped a sampling of 9 disks that were burned 7/04 - 8/04 -- 8 yr old burns. These are all 4X DVD-R that were PC burned & verified using DVD Decrypter's burn engine. I ripped three each of Memorex (Prodisk S03), Maxell yellow tops (MXL RG02), Ritek (Ritek G04).


The disks all appear to be perfectly preserved. They all ripped at full speed (4-5 min per disk) without any retry errors. A difficult to read disk will slow down the read rate and if bad enough will issue retry errors. None of that was observed here.


These disks are in sleeves and have been stored in a covered disk box in my DVD cabinet in the family room. No extremes of temperature and no light. But I suspect the quality of the burner used to make the disk is a major factor in the longevity question and may be more important than the ranking of the media.