Taiyo Yuden: difference between premium, hardcoat and regular?
 

Are JVC's (formerly Taiyo Yuden) 'premium' or 'hardcoat' blank dvds any better than their regular line?

These are two different types I'm seeing at what seems to be one of the major US sellers of JVC.

By 'regular line' I mean the ones that don't have any particular name. Not the 'Value Line', and not 'Water Shield'.

I want dvds that will last as long as possible. From the information on this site, it sounds like regular JVC-TYs are pretty much as archival as you can get (right?)

Both Premium and Hardcoat cost $6 - 7 more per 100 than regular JVC-TY.

Not a lot of money but I'm curious if they're better.

thanks

No.

Yes.

It often comes down simply to the age of packaging, as to why you see variant names on the TY media. To be completely honest, there's really no difference between Value Line, Premium Line, Professional Grade, Water Shield, etc. Not from a burning perspective, and not to users. Premium Line is supposedly "better", but for reasons that nobody really seems to know -- even vendors that sell it. If it's anything like Verbatim, I would guess that it's simply the difference in line age. A "batch" of discs can be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions (for the crappy media makers). The premium discs may simply come from a line that limits to 25,000 discs per batch, while the Value Line runs longer. Again, that's what Verbatim does. There may also be closer inspection at all steps. But given Taiyo Yuden's already high standards, it's not likely to be a wide gap. TY VL is certainly better than most "grade A" junk found from the likes of CMC, Ritek (Ritek dye), MAM-A and others.

Many thanks! This is all a good stuff to know.