I produce a high volume of DVDs and I always scan them - Most of the time it will be a TRT test now. On several I do run a scan just to give me an idea overall - The PIE/PIFs are well within specs, however by TY standards they should be 10 times lower. After a period of weeks or months I re-scan the same disc master backup that scanned with average results to start with, and that now scans at alarming rises in error rates with mountains of PIF at the beginning of the disc most often or scattered to the disc! That is unusual for TY - And while some people will say that PIE/PIF scans are unreliable, well it’s strange because the SAME spots that exhibited the degradation would FREEZE on most DVD players I tested it on.
Or have you just found that TY you are using now burns with more errors than your previous older batches, which may have burnt with much lower errors? Or are you saying both, that the old TY is better and the new TY is burning with more errors, and also degrading quicker? I’m just a little bit cloudy about that.
The older batches of TY are +R 8x, they burnt with excellent results, years ago now they scan perfect too no signs of degradation. Then for a while I started seeing all of a sudden a sharp rise in the error levels of newer batches of 8x +R discs so I siwtched to 16x DVD+R, it is obvious that TY was putting more resources into 16. At first the 16x batches were horrible, but that was due to the firmware perhaps not being optimized. Then after updating and fixes from TY, the 16x batches were better, much better, then all of a sudden a sharp rise in error and I would notice by the disc itself, imperfections, etc… so now whether 8x or 16x they exhibit high errors. Note that I have 5 new 20A1P LITEONS and I am certain it is not the drive or firmware because if I take some left overs from old batches and burn them with the same drive and firmware they burn excellent !
Now as for what you said about reflectivity and jitter. You’re most likely right, TY is not the king of high reflectivity - their 16+R is also not that good for low jitter or longevity in accelerated aging tests. In fact even searching the forums you’ll see plenty of T02/3 burns with over 9% jitter averages. Despite low errors, jitter is high, which IMO is not impressive.
How come TY can get away with this ? Don’t they run quality checks on their discs ? How can they deliver to the market discs that are outside strict specs in terms of stability and reflectivity ?
What makes me mad is that they were not always like that, this happened over time, and it is obvious that they no longer have quality control or don’t maintain their equipment very well.
I don’t know what else to use - I mean keep reading crap reviews about verbs, MBI, etc, it’s hard to rely on one brand now…I did post on this forum some scans of my VALUE LINE TYs - I had ordered a few spindles of those -R 8x value line thermal printable, and they had excellent and still do burn quite well with very low jitter and error values, no signs of degadation from those…funny, they are labeled VALUE LINE and burn well at 8x and 12x !!! My preium DVD+R 16x or 8x printable to hub give crap results in comparaison. I really don’t understand.
I’m not a TY fanboy at all. I don’t try to bash them either. But I do think plenty of people on this forum and many other forums throughout the world have absolutely zero clue about how overrated TY actually is. TY are praised for these home based tests which they score well on. Far too many people think that’s all there is to it and that’s the end of the story.
TY was the best - they were consistent and had extremely low error rates and reliable media across batches, not anymore.
So what should i use then ? Most of the stuff sold locally in stores are CRAP anyways - as to stuff sold online, I dunno anymore what to go for…I’ve also read about horror stories with verbatims going bad now too.
Just like Francksoy I’ve found other media, like CMC MAG E01 to be superior to ALL TY discs. Even T02 IMO. Looking at professional tests, the E01 sometimes doesn’t do that great for low errors but one thing it does do very well at is reflectivity. I’ve seen quite a number of tests and almost every disc scores with OVER .5 for the reflectivity rating. compare that to TYG02 which is sometimes between .38-.43. In fact, I don’t even think I’ve seen a TYG02 that has reached an acceptable level of reflectivity, which is .45 or above.
You’re refering to datarius test results right ?
RW media won’t work in playstations. They can scan well, but why don’t they work? Reflectivity of RW media is pathetically low. So that’s a good example of how important it is to have a higher reflectivity or at least one that is not far below acceptable standards.
Also depends greatly on your DVD player 
Luckily a lot of new players are relaxed and not as strict to the standards as some older DVD players. I can play ALL my Taiyo Yudens fine on my Sony DVP DVD Player, the same disc would freeze on occasion with my APEX AD1200 (a very fussy player) and it would freeze/skip at exactly the same area where I would see spikes in my scanning… My old TYs never did that. I tried different burning speeds, 16x, 8x, 12x, etc, you name it, tried different firmwares, even tried tweaking SMARTBURN settings (hypertuning, online hypertuning, etc.) same results.
Anyways, I’m just another opinion here which is against TY. It’s not the best media available and it shouldn’t be treated like the holy grail of blank media. I wouldn’t mind seeing some of your scans btw - before and after scans would be great 
I haven’t kept them all/saved them all but I would be glad to make some new as I still have plenty of old batches left - so I could compare old and new.
I am not as much concerned over the initial burn and HIGH PIF max, which is usually in the 1100-1600 PIF totals, but more concerned over the rise of individual values in short amounts of time which is steady.
I should point out that the discs are stored in controled environment where the humidity is never above 55% and room temperature is maintained in the 20~22C.
For home testing I use both KPROBE and the latest cdspeed, results are similar.
TRTs are perfect all the way I don’t recall seeing any TRT going bad, but there again a DVD reader on the PC is more tolerant than a standalone DVD player. Also the errors are those reported by the drive - so to confirm I’ve had them tested in lab and was confirmed high PIE/PIFs, even so higher than those reported by home testing software much higher…as not ALL sectors are scanned… another thing to keep in consideration, only a SAMPLING.
I wish the folks at TY could pull their foot out their ******** and address these issues instead of being a bunch of arrogant ****** and telling me that they stand by their media and how they are the best in the industry…LOL
- Made in India Verbs can be “crappy” sometimes (“crappy” as in your book based on these extremely picky PIE/PIF considerations), but MIT MCC 004 is still well alive and kicking.
