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On many forums, and certainly on ours, there are many questions about what CD-R media to get. Unfortunately all these discussions are always performed on the wrong way. People always discuss the brand name instead of the manufacturer.
Why this is wrong we will try to explain in this article, and also give you some guidelines how to discuss this subject properly. It still does not guarantee you to find the best CD-R, but it might make your quest for the one that fits best to your quality/price expectations a little easier.
Dozen factories, hunderds of brands:
First you will have to understand that there are only a dozen CD-R manufacturers on the world. But, as you probably have noticed, there are hundreds of CD-R brands. The difference between the manufacturer and the brand is easily explained: a manufacturer makes the discs (nameless) and the brand is just a name by which the CD-R is sold. Combine these two and you have a product you can sell. We will try to explain this with an example:
Lets say we have Factory A. Factory A makes high quality CD-R discs and sells them by their own brand called FactoryA CD-R.
Then we have Company A, this is company that for example already is a well established company with brand name CompanyA producing CompanyA video tapes, CompanyA casette tapes . CompanyA CD-RW drives etc etc. Now Company A has decided it also wants to sell CD-Rs. Now Company A can do two things:
If Company A decides that it buys the CD-Rs from Factory A, this means we have two the same CD-Rs on the market, but both with a different name:
CompanyA can ask FactoryA to put their name on the CD-Rs and package them. And because it’s a well established brand, it’s likely people will buy their CD-Rs. So CompanyA CD-Rs might even be more expensive, while they come from the same factory. CompanyA just uses it’s marketing force and brand name to sell their CD-Rs there is no difference in the actual product. Also note that FactoryA besides it’s own brand and CompanyA also could sell to CompanyB, but we’ll keep it simple now. I think it’s easy to understand that the market does it work on this.
Different month, differrent factory:
Unfortunately this is not all, on the market you might find FactoryB and FactoryC. Maybe FactoryB sells their CD-Rs for less and because Company A wants to make as much profit as possible it decides to switch to FactoryB. Now the following happens
Month #1:
Month #2
If you think this is just hypothetical, you’re wrong ! This is the daily business of many CD-R brands that are currently on the market. Some factories have their own brand and sell to many other companies and these same CD-Rs get sold on the market by a different brand name. And also many brands are switching factories once in a while. So as a consumer you can buy the same brand for months, but still get different CD-Rs.
How to find the factory ?
So now you know, but how will you be able to recognize what factory has made your CDs and what is more important, what factory makes the best CD-Rs ?
Fortunately there is a standard in the CD-R technology called ATIP (Absolute Time In Pre-groove) code. Without this data/info the CD-R cannot be used by a writer. The ATIP contains information about the manufacturer, but also technical information that is used by the CD-RW drive to write to the CD-R correctly.
There are many tools available on the internet that are able to read this ATIP information and allow you to tell the real manufacturer of the drive. Information from an ATIP read is for example this:
In this example I gave, the text that is important to us, a blue circle. It contains the information about who has manufactured the CD-R. Also you can do this, all you need to do is insert a CD-R to your CD-RW drive and fire up software that is able to read the ATIP code. Software that is able to do this are for example:
Now you know that there are only a few factories and hundreds of brands you will understand that there are a lot of brands that share the same ATIP code, while their prices might differ a lot. Now you will understand that it is pretty useless to discuss what brand is the best. Discussions should be, what factory is the best, and what brand is currently selling CD-Rs from that factory.
Now, what is the brand to buy ?
There are fortunately also some brands that always sell CD-Rs from t he same factory and of course there are also a lot of factories that have their own brand, and these will most likely always be from the same factory.
On Club CD Freaks you can find some additional help:
Keep in mind that discussing the quality of CD-R is subjective, and that the quality of the CD-R also depends on what speed, and with what drive it is written.
14 Comments
You can also get the ATIP info using Nero by going into the Medium-Info screen. When you're in there, hold the right shift key and hit refresh.
aint there also something like A-quality cdrs from a factory and B-quality cdrs from the same factory? this would make things more complicated i can also imagine that the quality of one production line in a factory aint allways the same etc... its nice u clarify this subject abit, but i think things are even more complicated then told here
Yes, things are a little more complicated indeed, but I thought starting with the basics and maybe write a more in depth article about it later. Most people will first need to understand about this I think, because I noticed that the majority of the people don't even know THIS ! While it's pretty important to know...
- guest
- Posts: 15288
- Posted on: 26 Sep 02 09:57
To add to the complexity, one also needs to consider the firmware revision that often is updated for media compatibility. I suppose the updated firmware will adjust the laser intensity etc for different media manufacturers etc. having an effect on how well the media is written etc. -- Gilbert
- guest
- Posts: 15288
- Posted on: 28 Nov 02 20:28
I have to say that in my opinion your article is too simplified. I understand you don't want to confuse newbies but if I didn't know better, I would assume nameless CDRs made at factory A are just the same as branded CDRs made at factory A when this is not necessarily true. Other then the different quality levels (4 if rumours are to be believed), there is also the issue of external quality control by the named brand CDRs. I think you should have mentioned this even if you didn't go into it in detail so people don't get the wrong impression. Also, I think another basic you should have covered is that just because you don't get any dud CDRs doesn't mean you have good CDRs. Often, people tell me their CDRs are good because they could right at 48x and didn't have any problems. Sometimes they mention the CDRs can be read fine in one player. However, this isn't really the reason I'm somewhat selective with my CDRs. The more important issue for me is can they be read by most drives with them and much more importantly, how long do they last? Because personally, I have had written CDRs stored in a cool dark place and not used much start to die in 4 months.
- guest
- Posts: 15288
- Posted on: 11 Feb 08 01:52
I've paid for this program, and still HAVE NOT recived my key..... BAD NEWS YOU LOOSE
- guest
- Posts: 15288
- Posted on: 26 Mar 08 02:07
Seemed to work fine. tried to copy No Country For Old Men and it was nearly complete-failed with error 116 no other explanation. Just tried to record the movie only which is 122 minutes
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- guest
- Posts: 15288
- Posted on: 14 Aug 08 17:32
Tried it, errors all over, I'll stick with Nero.
- guest
- Posts: 15288
- Posted on: 02 Oct 08 04:27
hiya all ... I have used several trial versions in the past without problems. STEVE
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