[Slight OT] - CD Lables

[Dan Jenkins]

Bill McGonigle wrote:

> 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. 

One of my clients is an international branded distributor of computer 
media. They have said good things about Taiyo Yuden as well. Their high 
end products used to be (and may well still be) Taiyo Yuden, if I 
recollect. They also said good things about Ritek. As they've pointed 
out to me, it is very difficult to sell higher quality (read, "not the 
cheapest possible") in the major channels, like Staples, Best Buy, etc. 
There simply isn't any interest from those retailers. So, almost all 
their quality products are sold in the EU, the Mideast or South America. 
Most products sold by their competitors in the US are from China. 
They've found it almost uneconomical to sell to the US market as it is 
now comprised.

> 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.

On CDs it is called the ATIP and on DVDs it is called the ADIP. You can 
use cdrecord with the -atip option to read and print out the 
information. ATIP apparently stands for Absolute Time in Pre-Groove. 
(Perhaps someone else knows what that has to do with the media 
manufacturer. :-)  The -atip option will also print out the DVD ADIP 
information as well. Not all burners support ATIP/ADIP querying, but, in 
my experience, most do.

-- 
Dan Jenkins (dan at rastech.com)
Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA --- 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support for over a Quarter Century