[Slight OT] - CD Lables

[Bill McGonigle]

On Apr 22, 2005, at 15:44, Randy Edwards wrote:

>    Being ignorant about DVDs, I'm curious: what is Taiyo Yuden and why?

It's a manufacturer of CD/DVD recordables.  They're in Japan and they 
use the highest quality materials.  Different vendors use different 
dyes in the recordable layer and some are just more expensive to make 
than others.  Labor in Japan is also more expensive than Taiwan or 
Malaysa, plus they're known for their quality so they charge more.  
They also have an ISO 9000 certified process which some buyers require, 
all adding a few cents to the price.

Their discs test the best (lowest error rates) last the longest in 
exposure tests, and are often resold for medical/ library archival work 
by other companies.

You can often find them directly online from various CD-specialty 
vendors in bulk spindle packs so you can often get a price like you'd 
find from Staples, et.al. in smaller quantity but still get the 
quality.  If you're in a bind and you have to buy from, say, Best Buy, 
look for 'Made in Japan' on the label and there's a very good chance 
you'll be buying Taiyo Yudens.  I believe there are tools that will 
read the non-writable part of the disc and tell you who the 
manufacturer is if you want to do some experimentation, but the 
rebranders change vendors without notice so it's hard to get any 
consistency that way.

I used to buy the best price I could get from Staples, where they'd 
wind up owing me $3 for a spindle of a hundred discs after rebate.  The 
value quickly evaporated when the media layer started to delaminate 
from several of the discs.  At the time I was working in a job where I 
was writing software for a robot that automated a CD burning process, 
about 300 a day, and IIRC it was a Plextor engineer who clued me in to 
Taiyo Yuden.

At the moment I'm not seeing injket-printable DVD-R on their corporate 
website but it also appears out of date.

-Bill
-----
Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
BFC Computing, LLC              Home: 603.448.1668
bill at bfccomputing.com           Mobile: 603.252.2606
http://www.bfccomputing.com/    Pager: 603.442.1833
AIM: wpmcgonigle                Skype: bill_mcgonigle

For fastest support contact, please follow:
http://bfccomputing.com/support_contact.html