JVC Taiyo Yuden DVD-R, best from Rima.com or somebody else?
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Is Rima.com bad to buy from? No, they're a trustworthy company. However, I do think Rima is excessively expensive, and the same media can be had cheaper from elsewhere. Specifically check out Meritline and Supermediastore. Another option is shop4tech. Best of all, ML and SMS are almost always running sales on their TY media. This site tries to track some of the best blank media prices. Find that info here: http://www.digitalFAQ.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm And yes, Taiyo Yuden is excellent media -- 8x or 16x. Hope that helps. :) |
I'll second what his Smurfyness said and add that you should not listen to anything that anyone says about buying from Rima because SMS and Meritline sell/have sold fake JVC/TY discs. They don't and never have. Ditto for JVC/TY Value Line allegedly being fake because Rima doesn't sell them. They're legit TY discs, TY just doesn't think they're "Premium" for some reason. Still some of the best discs you can buy.
For whatever reason, there aresome weirdly dogmatic Rima customers who have an irrational paranoia about Meritline and SMS. Rima might have been the best in 2003 or thereabouts, but their time has passed. They're an overpriced relic. |
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1. The common argument for Rima is an excuse that Meritline and Supermediastore sell fake media. (I would add that excuses can vary on the merchant, with undeserved negative criticism also being leveraged against shop4tech, Amazon and Newegg.) 2. But Meritline and Supermediastore do not, and never have*, sold fake JVC Taiyo Yuden media. 3. Furthermore, the JVC TY Value line discs are not fake simply because a store like Rima chooses not to carry them. On all three points, you're correct. :thumb: * However, in the interest of "full disclosure", I'll unfortunately have to complicate this a bit: When fake Taiyo Yuden media first came to market, around 2004 or so, quite a few media-selling stores were fooled. In fact, I'd bet almost anybody carrying TY media was fooled. (Rima may have been the exception, having truly never sold fake TY discs, hence the current myth based loosely on fact. What we do NOT know is if Rima also purchased fakes, but caught it earlier than everybody else.) Meritline and Supermediastore were among the fooled, at first selling the fake discs as legitimate TY discs. At that point in time, due to sites like this one, stores were proudly displaying the media IDs of discs! (We're quite proud of that, and we had frequent communication with media sellers in that era of blank sales.) Going from memory, Meritline pulled the fakes as legitimate TY sales, and sold them off as generic house-branded "grade A" media, and hid the media ID. SMS completely pulled the media, and it must've been sold off in bulk in some other method. In those days so long ago, ML (Comptree) and SMS (Linkyo) both had secondary companies selling media. ML's still exists, as CDrDVDrMedia.com, while SMS's secondary company is long since gone. The biggest loser from that was AllMediaOutlet.com, which now doesn't exist. They sold quite a bit of the fake media, to the detriment of their reputation. At the time, it seemed as if they didn't care, and it was all downhill from there. So this was a period of time that lasted a few months at most, in the early/mid part of last decade. In that era, a high-quality blank DVD-R was still at least $1-2 each (having been so long ago, I don't remember if it was $1 or $2), and quality DVD+R didn't really exist in abundance, or cheaply. Ricoh was the best disc easily found for under $3 each. These fake discs started an avalanche of media devaluation, which broke that sacred cow $1-2 mark, because they were using cheap manufacturing equipment, skimping on the quality of the dyes/parts of the discs, and not paying any royalties -- and part of that savings (for making illegal crap) was passed on to the consumer. Shop4tech.com earned a bad reputation many places, including this site, for clinging to various fakes and no-name junk discs for several years starting around this time -- often "upselling" their house branded junk, or even going so far as to hide better media (like legitimate TY) from their homepage and online ads. They were removed from our DO NOT BUY list only a year or so ago, having finally come to their senses, and selling good media (sales, ads, easy to find on the site, no "upselling" of junk, etc). Quote:
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Rima good? Yes. Rima reliable? Yes. Rima the best? Not really, not if pricing is a concern. Surely not for the casual home user or small business. There are a number of other companies that have higher-than-discount pricing who are also good, such as Gotmedia.com, MediaMegaMall.com, and CDROM2GO.com. Many of those also appear to hit up larger target audiences, such as organizations, governments, and studios. I'd go so far as to guess much of their business endeavors are aimed at marketing and support to those audiences. (Because this site draws a readership from those audiences, all three of those have been advertisers here in the past.) Just for clarification and extra details. :o |
Yes, you understood the gist of my argument. There are a few vocal VideoHelp posters who refuse to patronize Meritline and SMS because "they sell fakes." They also claim that Value Line are/might be fakes because they're not sold at Rima.
I could have sworn that Meritline and SMS had never actually sold fake TY fakes as TY (just house brand), but I always defer to you on this stuff and trust that you remember it better. Still, they never knowingly sold fakes. That might be why I misremembered it. AllMediaOutlet was the site at the front of the fake Maxell and "Piodata is Pioneer" messes, right? My favorite high profile story about fakes is still Ritek falsely claiming that any bad Ritek/Ridata DVD-Rs were fakes when people complained about the steep quality drop from the G03 discs to the G04 discs. It makes me so happy that TY discs are now reasonable priced and Verbatim AZO can be easily found for very low prices online. I can remember a time where the most workable scenario for me was reimbursing a friend who bought Verbatims at a Sam's Club (they had the best prices by far and no stores near me) and shipped them to me. |
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The best part of Supermediastore's response was that SMS took it upon themselves to write several "How to Spot Fake Taiyo Yuden" guides, based on their own knowledge, as well as assistance from writers at this site, and information being posted at CDFreaks (now Myce). SMS was really putting the "super" in their name, by warning everybody of this. It's not often a store actually decides to do help their customers in this way. They were also quite willing to take a rap on the knuckles for the accidental sales of fake TY discs. It was a welcomed bit of honesty in an industry that was full of shysters at that time (AllMediaOutlet, YesBuy, Americal, several others I can't remember.) Quote:
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This ignores the fact that Ritek was never high-quality archival grade media anyway. It always suffered from a higher percentage of coasters, and it always had issues with playback (deduced as being due to poorer reflectivity as compared to other discs, due to the dyes in use). RITEKG03 DVD-R was simply better than average, and for a year or two it had an undeserved high level of respect. It reminds me of the dot-com bust, where dot-com sites were valued much higher than was deserved. In both cases, those unrealistic bubbles burst, and reality was restored. Quote:
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I don't think that the two CMC-made Verbatim lines necessarily mean the beginning of the end. The AZO discs are still available in large quantities at good prices after an early scare (reports of Life Series UPC stickers on AZO packages, Verbatim reps saying Life Series was the same as DataLifePlus/AZO, etc.) that implied AZO were gone from consumer/retail channels, which turned out to be BS. |
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* Related side topic: These days, when a disc fails in a burner, a lot of old-timers like to jump to the conclusion that the drive is at fault for not "supporting" the disc. And then there are many more who just parrot this misinformation, having very little idea on what that even means logistically. While it is true that media works better with specific support for a disc, most burners come equipped with defaults, based on what it can discover from the disc on its own. So even lacking "proper" support, a good disc should still burn well with one of the available default write strategies. That ability to burn properly, even without exact firmware match in the drive, is one reason the disc is good! (MCC/MKM discs are very well known for this!) Moderate grade discs are picky, and require exacting massage from a burner, while lousy media won't burn well regardless of ID support. Princo's solution for this lack of support was to just steal an ID that was supported: TDKG01 and/or TDKG02. With a stolen media code, the disc worked "well enough" (it could be seen by the drive, it could burn), but the failure rate was much higher than on a Princo disc with the proper PRINCO ID, in a 103/104 drive with proper firmware upgrades applied. My own A03 drive seemed as if it knew something was hinky, because it would take an extraordinary amount of time to lock onto the disc and make it ready. TDK cried foul, users cried foul, and Princo backed off. It wasn't until much later on that "crossflash" tools became available, well past the prime of these drives, which allowed for the OEM "A" burners to be turned into Pioneer retail "1" burners. Flash/Flashman of RPC1.org was primarily responsible for those tools. In the earlier days of this site (2002-2003), LS was very involved in drive "hacking", having created custom firmware for the A03, turning it into a 103 with added media support. By the time this mess was resolved in full, the Pioneer DVR-105 4x drive was at market, and Pioneer quit letting OEMs having unique models, as it reflected bad on their brand at a time when competing drive makers were starting to appear in North America. And that's about the time MXLRG01 fakes started to show up, which sounds like the era when you entered DVD burning. You missed out on a lot of high-cost drama and technical aggravation if you entered the DVD burning world in the era of 4x burners. By that point in time, most of the "format war" was starting to die down (remember the DVR-106 and Sony DRU-500 merged DVD+R and DVD-R not even a year later), and the cost of media had dropped from $5+/each to ~$2/each. It's arguable as to whether MXLRG01 fakes were done for support, or for brand recognition. I tend to vote for support, because it was really still pre-awareness for the masses (at least as much as online communities form "masses"). The fake Taiyo Yuden from later years were most definitely done for the point of cashing in on the TY name. That's even more obvious when firmware hackers started to find alternative codes (and therefore write strategies) worked better for the disc's burning quality. Still lousy, but better than using TY specs. Quote:
Within a short time, the market was flooded with tons of lousy RitekG04 media, under all kinds of brands, sold at all sorts of mainstream office supply stores. Arita, for example, and the "mountain range" coated discs. We scrubbed that advice from the guide quickly. I recall Ritek "claiming" the Arita brand, among others, but quickly backing away from that stance when forums start to rack up complaints. And that's around the time the press release was issued, claiming ID theft and improper resales of blanks meant for destruction. That Office Depot sold these discs has always been a weak link in their claims that "all" bad Ritek was not their fault. I recall the owner of the European Ridisc being pretty pissed about it, too, as that partnership turned sour -- which then got worse when Ridisc started to use fake CMC media from that shoddy UK operation E-Net. I have a lot of anti-ENet information archived somewhere on the archive server, which includes even very anti-Muslim ramblings from people who live near the facility. Quote:
Disclaimer: Please be aware that EVERYTHING written in this post is me going off memory, with just a few checks on facts to information I can easily locate. I know long-time media folks like online user "pepst" read this forum, as do manufacturers. If something is slightly amiss, feel free to make an addendum to this thread, or provide your own conflicting/agreeing memories of that era. This was a fun reminisce! :) |
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By the way, do you have any experiences with Ritek G01 or G02 media? Were they gold sputtered? |
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Speaking of junk media, did you ever get those Princo blanks I sent you? Those came from allmediaoutlet back in late 2003. Considering the volume of Princo disks my friend bought during late 2001 to 03, I don't recall seeing any faked media code discs. Chances are most of those burns were tossed or given away anyway (if they even work anymore). |
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One of them appears to be gold sputtered, yes. The bottom is not silver that I can see. It's gold all the way through. I forget which is G01, which is G02. One is gold, one is silver. Do you not have samples of these media? I have multiples (burned) of each type. Quote:
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I forgot that I even had some of this stuff set aside on the archives. I'll start publishing some of this stuff into new guides and articles, or simply copy/paste as raw data into new forums posts, as time permits. Since there's still a high interest in both ATI related topics, and blank media related topics, I'll keep those high on the list. |
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