I know that statement is pretty harsh but I was making some random read-back tests of media in my DVD collection and I’m quite alarmed about how much my Ritek G05’s have deteriorated in such a short time (one or two months).
I stopped using Princo’s as soon as I realised that about 10% or more become unreadable with CRC errors after a few months. Up till now I’ve had no such trouble with Riteks, but since some members here have reported “Princo-like†experiences with Ritek I decided to test the read-back of a random selection of my burnt Riteks.
Ok the good news is that none were totally unreadable with CRC errors, but I did notice that several had a very wobbly DVD-speed curve and I know for certain that all were good when burnt because I test each burn with DVD-speed right after burning. At this stage of the test I didn’t know which discs were G05’s and which were G04’s or G02’s, because they all look quite similar.
Now here’s the really disturbing part, when I crossed checked with the mid codes I found all the ones with the wobbly DVD-speed read-back curve were G05’s. In fact every G05 had a wobbly DVD-speed read-back and all the G04’s had smooth read-back. But the G04’s were older burns than the G05’s so this bodes very badly for the long term survival of this media. Considering most of these G05’s are only one or two months old I wouldn’t be surprised if many were unreadable within one year.
So I seems I need to treat G05’s like I did with Princo before, not trust them with anything important, never buy them again, and try to unload the ones that I currently have to people that I hate. :(.