I was impatient and already ordered the 8x Ritek media. What kinds of issues were you having with these discs?

I wish someone would do some actual testing, and then publish the results. Ralph LaBarge did this a few years back, but I've not seen anything since then. There sure are a lot of opinions, urban legends, and voodoo incantations floating around, but very little scientific, controlled testing.

This same question used to get asked a lot when CD-R discs were going from 1x to 48x, and lots of people felt more comfortable burning at slower speeds. There were certainly a lot of plausible theories about why slower would be better (less vibration, more time to burn the dye, etc.), but just as many reasons why these factors wouldn't matter (better design dampens the vibration, and dye formulations were changed to work with the shorter duration pulses required at higher speeds).

If you find a site that offers some real testing, I'd sure be interested. The videohelp site provides user-contributed, andecdotal testing, but it can be very misleading because no user ever holds all the variables constant, and then only changes one thing, which is what must be done to determine the answer to a question like yours.

Out of 100 G05 discs, about 7 or 8 of them failed to burn and about 5 or 6 people called to say that the discs would not play on their players. These same people had been able to play the Ritek G04 discs that I had burned for them using the same burner and software. They were all able to play the Verbatim 8x discs, even those that I burned at 12x. I could have just been that one batch of G05 discs, but I haven't ordered any more, so I guess I'll never know for sure.

John

I use Ritek G04 all the time. None returned. I never burn above 1-2x. I believe it makes a difference. Please note that DVDA 1.0 misreports the burn speed. I don't know if DVDA 2.0 has the same problem.

John

I've come to the following conclusions:

(1) The recording process is not bulletproof. Every disk will have errors. The issue is how many errors, and whether those errors are correctable. There are standardized tests for this (see below).

(2) I've had nothing but success sticking with Ritek and Pioneer. Last fall I switched from the G04 (4x) formulation to the G05 (8x) version. Out of 150 G05 disks created (with full-face labels), one came back. I swapped another G05 copy, which worked okay. The returned disk played fine on my two DVD players and on my two DVD-Rom drives. Go figure.

(3) The Pioneer 107 that I'm using (8x) is solid. One person on this site reported that the 109 model (16x, DL burning) has a few teething problems but no doubt will be solid with a new firmware update. Pioneer makes great burners.

(4) As for burn speed, I burn only at the max rated speed of the media. After all, when something is rated for a certain speed, it means that it passes the allowable error level at that speed, so why not use it? But I believe it's also true that the error rate decreases at a reduced burn speed, due to reduced jitter (I think that's the variable that matters). If you're doing a mass duplication, the burn speed can also matter in another way. Last year, I was burning about 100 CDs on a BTS 52x burner. I was using Fujifilm 48x CD blanks, and was running at 48x. After doing several dozen, I began getting bizarre failures where the laser was clearly turning off and then back on as the burn progressed--you could see concentric burn rings on the disk. I assumed something was overtemping, and reduced the burn speed to 40x. After that, no more problems, and the overall time to burn a disk only increased from maybe 2 minutes to 2:15. Haven't seen any temperature issues with my Plextor DVD drives, though.

There are sites which do objective tests. Take a look at the CDR-Info site, for example. But be prepared to spend 30 minutes--there is a lot of detailed information here.

Thanks for the link to the CDR site. That is exactly what I was looking for.

To johnmeyer's point: I agree that you really need formal testing. Moreover, each type of media tends to work differently depending on the drive in question. If you get a solid, error-free burn, your compatibility will be a non-issue.

I follow the reviews over at CDRLabs.com. For each drive they review, they grab several brands (and speeds) of media and run them through several error tests and publish the resulting error graphs. Based on this data, I ended up buying Verbatim 8x DVD+R media for my NEC 3500 (unfortunately the NEC is not the best drive for DVD-R).

You may want to see if your drive has been reviewed at CDRLabs, and if so, what type of media works best with it.

Typically, the dupe shops burn at 2X, regardless what the media speed is rated.

With the turn around speeds that these shops are advertising, I seriously doubt that they're burning at 2x speed. Is there somewhere where they say they do this?

Well I got the Ritek G05 8x blanks yesterday. I ran off the first 35 or so discs in a duplicator loaded with Pioneer A09 burners at 12x using a verify to make sure there were no errors. All of them passed a verify after the 12x burn and seem to play fine in all my players. I'm happy so far.

I'm using Maxell 8x DVD media (copper-colored) on a Pioneer A09 which is rated for 16x. Note that by using Nero (Nero Recode in my case) and a firmware update for the A09, the 8x disc burns at 16x without hitch!
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Do they play on EVERYONE's DVD players? 1x-2x seems to provide the best compatibility when combined with the most reliable media.