In a nutshell...
You can pay much bigger bucks for 100% burns every time with no coasters (i.e, useless discs for sitting under your tea mug). If you can't afford pro-brand names, then this is where you want to be, the 50 Pack DVD-R from Sony. If I have a max of 6 bad discs in a 50 pack, then that is the limit for bad discs that should be in a 50 pack for me. To be honest the only two mid-priced brands that generally stay under this benchmark are SONY and IMATION, but SONY pips IMATION. The downside is that the plastic on the disc is hard to write on but SONY are producing a new type of disc that comes with a paper type top surface for easy writing. Anyway having used nearly every brand out there I can safely say that SONY DVD-R is where I reach on the shelf. Having dealt with other brands that even produced 100% defective DVDs in a 50 pack I am very happy that SONY maintain a somewhat high quality.
DVD-R is best for movies. DVD+R for data. I recommend PLEXTOR burners. Sony 50DMR47RS4 16x DVD-R Discs (50 Disc Spindle)
I usually use nothing but Sony DVD-R disks. They have aways performed better than the other brands. It's seems that in the past year I have been having increasing problems finding a spindle of these disks that doesn't have more than a few "bad" disks. I recently puchased a 25 pack spindle and every disk in it worked fine... then I just bought a 50 pack spindle and have already had 5 disks fail while dubbing. I don't know if Sony has done something different in manufacturing these disks? I'm kinda bummed because I can't find anything better... and these are too expensive to be chucking into the trash.
I've burned a lot of these discs and haven't had a single problem yet using my Plextor PX-716UF drive. In my experience, these discs have been more reliable than other brands such as Memorex and TDK.
9 months later, still not a single problem.
I've used Sony brand DVDs off and on over the years and usually have no trouble with them, using a Pioneer and a Panasonic burner. Be aware that Sony actually isn't a primary manufacturer, however; they just take disks made by other makers and brand them as their own. But now that they're making the disks in Malaysia as well as Taiwan and I'm hearing more and more about problems with the Malaysian made disks, I just don't have the same confidence in them that I used to. For example, the Sony gold Accucore disks that I have now are actually RITEKW01 media, and I've had serious problems with both Memorex and Ritek disks going bad after a few years. If you check out the cdfreaks forum and other places on the web where optical media and disks are discussed you'll see many people talking about the problems they've had with the Ritek and Memorex disks. The disks that I have that are now unreadable are 3-5 years old, but some people are saying that even after 1 or 2 years the disks are going bad. This makes them useless for me for even short to medium term storage.
I would just get the Taiyo Yuden disks. Their name comes up again and again in these forums for quality and reliability. They are only made in Japan. Be sure you have true T-Y though as they are often faked. Real T-Y have a small ring near the hub in the dye area that is easily visible. It's said this is more expensive to manufacture and harder to fake. If you can find real Japanese made Verbatims those should still be good too. The problem with them is that Verbatim has licensed its technology to various offshore manufacturers and many people are saying their quality has slipped as a result. One point in their favor is that Verbatim uses a metal stabilized azo dye, said to be the best of all the dye types, even better than Taiyo Yuden's super-cyanine and Mitsui Advanced Media's phthalocyanine. Whichever way you decide to go, good luck with your optical media and archiving!
I guess I'll be the first to say it. These sony discs weren't completely compatible with my dvd writer. The problem I ran into was that the memory buffer wouldn't properly load when I start burning, and the session would stall and ultimately fail. This happened about once every five discs. Sometimes the problem went away when I restarted my computer - and sometimes it didn't. To that end I always had my fingers crossed every time I started a session, because the results were completely unpredictable.
My dvd writer is manufactured by pioneer. I'm currently using maxell discs with much better success - no failures thus far. Obviously everyone's computer setup is different, so I can't tell you these discs are poor because it could be a technical problem on my end that I'm overlooking. But if you do end up having trouble burning discs, then you're not alone.
I have a SONY DRU710A 16x DVD burner with the latest firmware installed. All of my burning software only recognize these discs as 8x write. Even Nero's program that scans the disc and tells you the actuall speed says these are up to 8x NOT 16x. I've also used Roxio Disc Copier 7 and 8, all only go to 8x when these are put in. I just reloaded an older firmware version and now it can be 12x... - Sony Dvd- - Blank Dvd - Blank Dvd Media - Dvd Media'
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