Kodak Gold CD-R's going bye-bye?

From: CLASSICCMP_at_trailing-edge.com <(CLASSICCMP_at_trailing-edge.com)>
Date: Mon Jul 23 20:14:56 2001

> One of the major heartburns I have with CD-R media is that
>it's quite difficult to tell the good from the bad.

That was my point #1: Buy a product that you know with a known distribution
path from the manufacturer. That's why I like Kodak over Mitsui. (Not
that it'd be impossible to find a list of official Mitsui dealers, but Kodak
has a bunch of old-school distributors who work just fine for me. And
there have been rumors - with little to nothing to back them up - that
many of the Mitsui-branded disks being sold in the US now were actually
made in one of the lower-tier plants in Taiwan.)

> disks don't all measure up the same. I tend to buy them in very
> small amounts so that I don't get burned too badly if they turn out
> to be lemons.

OTOH I buy in quantities of 500-1000 every few months, and I don't
want to take the risk with that amount of money that I'm buying junk.

Sometimes I do buy a spindle of the cheap junk just to see who made
it that week. The Imation stuff (yes, Imation, the company that used
to be the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing company that made top-name
media for years) was crappy CMC Magnetics junk according to the ATIP code
the week I bought it, and I've not touched their branded CD-R's since.
The IBM no-names (hey, you ought to tell that I've got high standards when
I call IBM a risky also-ran!) turned out to be Ricoh phthalocyanine
disks, so sometimes the cheap junk might not be all that bad.

> CompUSA used to sell some nice dark blue dye disks
>under their name but then I made the mistake of buying one of their
>bulk packs which turned out to use the light green dye and were
>really crappy. I'd gladly pay the additional money if I had a
>concise guide as to just which were the high quality media.

Lose the CompUSA junk. They do light up nicely in the Microwave, though :-).

Tim.
Received on Mon Jul 23 2001 - 20:14:56 BST