wrote:
> Hey Everyone
> Not sure if this was covered in the last discussion of how long CD's will
> last or their over all quality. Here is an interesting article on quality of
> CD's. Not sure if it is based in any fact though.
> http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_quality.shtml
>
> I don't know about you, but I was confused about the quality of CD's.
When I compare test against test from various sources it gets even more
unclear. Not a lot of agreement.
One brand I've never had fail (fuji) gets bad marks. Another that I lost
quite a few unrecorded blanks due to coating deterioration (sony) gets
good marks. On the sony ones, those that I recorded on have not
deteriorated, only the ones not used. Figure that one. Once I've burned
a CD-R I've yet to have one fail.
I still use both brands. I also use 80 minute CD-R, which, more and more
are all I find around. And they called those illegal.
I'm pretty sure there are some poorly made CD-R's. Or probably more
correctly some poorly made batches of CD-R's. The high popularity and
cheap price for the disk will make for lots of corner cutting.
I stick with brand names, and burn carefully. I don't use high speed
burning, normally either 4x or 6x. And make multiple copies.
The stuff I really want to protect is also on optical disks. CD-R are
sometimes called optical disks, but there are real archival quality
optical disks. They more closely resemble minidiscs in that they are in
a protective shell. And their ratings are much higher than CD-R. You
really want to protect it get a real optical drive.
The unfortunate thing is that optical disks cost more. So, in time the
cheapskate users will drive them off the market. Zip disks already did a
lot of damage. Then there will be no trustworthy archival disks. We are
about due for another big lesson, about like the lesson that was taught
when things put on computer tape were considered archival. By the time
they learned better a lot of data was gone.
Walt
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