Verbatim/Kodak Gold Media Question

Where? Are you in the states or Europe? I'd kill for some branded Optodisc.

/me lives in a country run by idiots in South East Asia. And no, TY is virtually non-existent locally even though we're close to Japan.

Kodak-branded media found here are usually:

A. ©2005 8x/16x DVD±R and are MIT by Optodisc
B. ©2007 16x DVD±R and are MIT by Prodisc
C. ©2007 4x DVD±RW and are MIT by Optodisc

Obviously the only good Kodak-branded media on my list are made by Optodisc, recent Prodisc-made Kodak are absolutely - they even won't burn well on recent LG (H62N )/Samsung (S203N )/Pioneer (DVR-112D )/Optodisc (7200 ) from experience.

There's also a cheap influx of Samsung Pleomax MIT (~$5.30/25pk spindle) with a graphic of a weird blue alien reclined on a pillow and listening to an old-school portable cd player - but that's totally off-topic.

This is from the c't magazine test:
Kadak gold dvd-r are bad, from 18 dvd's, there were 4 were bad after burning, with 11 ours of testing of lifetime testing the rest of the dvd's are bad.

conclusion test:
Verbatims archival grade dvd-r are the best, lifespan 10-15 years, this is 4x better then the rest of the dvd's.

Fascinating. We can't find MIT Kodak or MIT Pleomax here in the states anymore. It's all MIC.

The MIC ones we get usually are of Philips DVD±R (CMC MAG M01/AM3) and lots of fake and ultra cheap (and unreliable) media mostly coming from HK. We don't have any Gold Verbatim/Kodak, much less even premium TY or Maxell so missing out on the branded Optos (Kodak and Samsung commonly) ain't as bad as missing out on "the good stuff". Though I've found a store that somehow gets Verbatim-branded TY CD-Rs (old ©2004 Pastels and recent ©2007 Extra Protection Pastels) that's intended for the European market but that's about it - and I won't doubt it if they got it through "gray market" schemes.

No one here (normally) ever buys the highest quality media, only freaks like me - they think that the cheapest is just the same as the most expensive, it's just the branding that's different. So the market's not well-saturated with Gold/premium discs. Sucks IMHO.

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Last edited by evo69; 22-09-2008 at 06:29.

Don't you find it reeeally annoying? I do.

Pears and apples: brands (TY) vs. disc models (Verbatim archival). My respect for C't methodology is about to drop.

As Dhakaas said though, the Verbatim is better. The TY, (whichever MID it is) reaches 280PIE earlier than the verbatim.

Some comments in "the other thread".

Something else: this 280 limit is a relative thing. I'm almost certain that if PIF stays more or less in-specs, many a modern drive would read a disc with 350 PIEs without any problem. So in real-world, looking at the curves I'd say the TY disc *could* have the upper hand for data safety.

Besides, the C't article doesn't mention if this limit is reached in a given area, at a single point, or over larger areas of the disc. Such precisions could make a world of difference in the way the data should be interpreted. So in my view there is far too much info missing in this article, to make even remotely sound conjectures based on this data. Except that you won't see me buy Kodak media anytime soon. But This was true even before this article was published. *LOL*

I thought the same thing - whether a disc is readable or not is not a boolean property ("true" or "false") but rather a fuzzy property (e.g. "mostly readable with some difficulty in these drives, readable in that drive, but not fully readable in those drives").

The 280 PIE limit (using one kind of scanner) is just a way of getting consistent pass/fail results, but actual readability itself is a very complex issue and hard to predict and express.

C't test is based on the full ECMA standards. Which means one spike of 280 (or higher) on CATS is failure. I agree that in real life there can be big differences between a small 280 peak on CATS and a block. I also agree that most disc's which report 280 are still read fine by modern drives. But officially the standard says after 280 it's over.

Mainly for those not familiar with ECMA standards, I'd like to stress DrageMester's point.
I apologize to those who whill find that I'm merely rephrasing his post.

The 280 PIE "limit" is an industry standard. Not a technical treshold. It means that it's actually a recommendation, which has no technical value other than introducing a point of reference for everyone, i.e.... a standard. There is nothing happening at all, technically, when the PIE reach 281. Reading can fail at PIE-286, or 54, or 400, or 24, or 600.

281 simply means out-of-specs according to ECMA standards, assuming the testing drive has been calibrated properly. But it doesn't mean much in terms of readability, as this will depend on many other factors. I have here perfectly readable discs with PIE > 400 when tested in the same drive that reads them flawlessly. And on the other hand, I have discs with very significant reading issues, with PIE < 100 when tested in the same drive that chokes on them. This can be traced down to several factors but that's not the place to discuss such things.

~
As for the article, the more I think about it, the more I find it far from scientifically sound. There are too many holes in this cheese, not counting factual errors that Dakhaas pointed out to me (in another thread).


_

May I add that as it was testing archival grade media, the real test would have been the actual retrievability of the data in an array of drives at given points in time, rather than the degradation rate in terms of PIE in a testing drive. I'll even call their approach, well, foolish. In my book at least. Whoi cares if the PIE is in-specs in a testing drive, if the disc can't be read in end-user drives... which can definitly happen.