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i decided to challenge one of the companies i contacted and i asked them what ID will show on there media and the reply was : (i quote) " id = Tyg & Mcc code "
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Oh please, please, please --
tell us who this was! These fake-media charlatans all need to be exposed for the crap-making entities they are.
Taiyo Yuden does not outsource its production to random Asian companies in China and Taiwan. Period.
Same for Mitsubishi, although there is a legitimate source for MIC (made in China) Verbatim MCC's that are being spotted in various locations in the world. At the moment, I've not researched who this is. I highly doubt whoever you contacted is this MCC-authorized producer, as MCC probably would not allow the MCC discs to be sold outside their own Verbatim brands. And bad product would likely be destroyed, not sold off as cast-off grade to low-budget economics. More on that in a minute.
Mitsubishi/Verbatim's main producing factories are/were owned by MBI, CMC, FTI and Prodisc, plus their own Singapore factory (MIS, or "made in Singapore"). Authentic MCC media is always made to MCC specs, with their stampers and materials, with MCC staff on-site to inspect product, regardless of who's factory/building is being used (MBI, CMC, Prodisc, FTI, etc).
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so thats really enough for me to decide not to work with them
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Indeed!
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i will consider Prodisc/Infomedia
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I would go to Prodisc first. Infomedia is probably okay if it's lower cost that Prodisc. These are not necessarily "archival grade" discs, but they are still very good. I'd rank them higher than Ritek or CMC discs, with whom they share the 2nd class grade on
our DVD quality ranking charts, but not quite good enough to be in that 95-99% range. Without referring to the research, going off memory, I'd put Prodisc in the 90-95% range, meaning that 1 in 10-20 discs generally has an issue. Something like Ritek or CMC falls well into the 80%'s numbers.
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finally, whats your opinion on LeadData / Cmc (i realized that your opinion is that Cmc are real crap, have i got it right?)
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You'll find my opinions of LeadData throughout this topic:
http://www.digitalFAQ.com/forum/show...a-vs-2407.html
It's a fairly lousy and unreliable disc that I've not seen in years now. I would be surprised if they even manufactured blanks at this point in time. There's been nothing spotted in North America or Europe for a very long time now. The last LD discs were seen under the Fry's Electronics GQ label during the 8x days.
CMC is a mediocre disc, with quality ranging in the 80%'s on our charts -- meaning out of a spindle of 100 discs, burned full to 4.38GB, at rated speed or even down to half rated speed, you tend to get about 15-20 discs with problems of some kind. Sometimes it's much better, with only a few coasters. Sometimes it's far worse, with a half spindle failing to burn well at all. It's good for duplication, because it can be acquired rather cheaply, but it's nothing I'd suggest for masters. If a duplicated copy ends up being bad, it's easy to just re-burn another one.
I would suggest it's okay to sell, for the purpose of duplication, but it really should be marked off as "not archival" in some manner, so buyers don't stupidly misuse it for something that they cannot afford to lose. For example, the only copy of a family home movie, family photos burned to discs, or computer data backups. And sadly, people lose their memories all the time because they just bought "what was cheap" in the store to keep their now-gone images that can never be replaced. Almost weekly I get pleas from adults/kids whose parents have died, and their only videos of them from the past decade were burned to Ritek or CMC media (or something even worse!) that turned out to be a bad burn. Sometimes it's special ceremonies (bar mitzvahs, weddings), a baby taking his/her first steps, etc. Sometimes I can recover some portion of these bad discs, and other times it's 100% gone forever. It's just so sad that trying to save $5 in the store cost them their precious memories.
The biggest issue with CMC is that there appear to be varying grades of the discs. Some are their "best" graded discs sold under major name brands like HP, TDK, Memorex, etc, while other lower-quality rejects are sold off as overprints or label-less media. The best CMC media falls in that 80%'s range, and the worst ones tend to be 0-50% success ranges. Those discs are treated the same as "fakes" for the moment -- it's complete crap that uses a known-good ID. The only difference is these were (usually) legitimately made. The extra rub is that some places are making CMC fakes, because unauthorized/stolen CMC stampers and IDs are reported to be used at those locations. It's complicated, and I'd have to review several dozen documents that are currently unavailable. It's one of those topics that literally gives me a headache trying to explain to laymen. It's a good representation of the over-complicated mess that business has become.
