NEC 2500 & 3500 & Plextor Yuden T02 quality issues

Hi all,

I bought a spindle of gold-coloured 8x Plextor DVD+R with Taiyo Yuden T02 dye a couple of months ago. Since I own a NEC2500, I was unable to do any quality (read K-probe) testing.

After a while, I started doing some primitive K-probe scanning on my JLMS XJ-166 and found inconsistent error rates at about a quarter to half way the disc. See for yourself

Picture one is a scan of a Plextor NEC 2500 burn @8x with Herrie Beta 5 firmware;
Picture two is a scan of a Philips Ricoh JPNR02 NEC2500 burn @8x with Herrie Beta 5

I have already found out the following:
- Changing the 2500 to stock firmware gives comparable results
- I'm having bad results with multiple Plextor discs from different parts of the spindle of 50
- Since the Philips and Platinum Ricoh JPNR02 discs are burning excellently on my 2500, the problem should not be burner hardware related in my opinion.

Could this really be a bad batch of Taiyo Yuden media? Anyone feel like commenting?

I wouldn't put a whole lot of stock into kprobe scans with a DVD-ROM.

Yeah I know that, but a colleague of mine has playback problems on his dvd-player with the same batch of discs burnt by a 3500. We're seeing the same kind of things in our k-probe attempts on the same type DVD-ROM drive.

So in short, I know these scans are not 100% reliable but fit for comparison and that's were we see that Ricoh discs burn better than TY........

Sounds like you got some bum disks. I've been burning the yudens @ 16x and they play on everything. On a dvd player that doesn't support dvd +/-R at all I can get the yudens to play if I burn them @ 12x. None of the other discs will play in it. I have some ritek 4x -Rs and some ricoh jpnr 01s and they won't play in that pos no matter how good the burn was. Even if I burn them @ 4x they don't play. The yudens I have are perfect, I've never seen a gold one. Maybe you got some fake yudens, there have been some floating arround. I've tried doing k-probes with my dvd-rom too, it goes trought the roof with errors @ 16x, but when the speed is below 12x the errors are under 200. I wish I could limit the speed of that thing but it ignores any setting in nero's drive speed or in k-probe or nero's quality test. Better yet, seen as how the chipset supports it, I wish nec would make a firmware that will do quality scans.

Yo-

I kprobed one TY T02 disc five times and got five different results on a modded 166s- what a joke - do not put much faith in the readings from a Litty non burner-IMO

Mike

* Brand is Plextor and the price wasn't fakish... , supplier is well known with a good reputation here in Holland.

* Have burned about 50 Verbatim Datalife Plus Pastel Yuden T01 in the past on this drive and an 811s (RIP) without the slightest of a problem.

* Try CD-Bremse to control your DVD-reader read speed, works ok!