San Francisco (IDGNS) - Taiwanese disc maker Ritek plans to start mass producing BD-RE (Blu-Ray Disc Rewritable) discs as well as HD DVD-RE (high definition) discs in the third quarter of this year, a small but important step to helping reduce the cost of such discs for users. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20070522/tc_infoworld/88737_1)

Well, for DVDs at least, I've generally avoided any Ritek-branded discs. They suck.

Some Ritek-made name brand discs seem to be better, but still don't seem top tier.

Wow.. my experience has been the exact opposite. My Ritek experience has been fantastic. Hasn't been a darned thing of mine they don't work in. I have used oodles on mine and made for my friends as well. No complaints at all.

Cal

No problems here either.

Well, Ritek branded discs have a bad reputation, and in my experience that bad reputation is justified, esp. if you burn near rated speed.

I have a few fairly picky machines when it comes to DVD-R quality, and they consistently have problems with Ritek discs, even when said discs work on the original burner. I have not had the same issues with Taiyo Yuden and Apple media for instance.

Aren't most discs made by Ritek for <insert company name> anyways? It seems to me that each time I do a disc info, Riteks' name comes up quite often.

Yes, Ritek makes discs for several brands. Interestingly, I have had problems with some of those as well. Memorex for example is often Ritek, and I consider Memorex 2nd tier in terms of reliability with DVD-R.

However, some reasonably good brands which sometimes use Ritek media (eg. Maxell) tend to be better than Ritek-branded media itself, at least in my experience. I suspect it has something to do with QA.

I rarely burn at maximum speed. I think it sort of like driving my bike at red line. There only a few rare instances that require me to go that fast :) . I usually buy the cheapest stuff going so I must have Ritek in my collection.

I wonder if this will push DL disks down even further in price.

It's always recommended to burn at the slowest speed.

Kind of like driving really, slow down and get to your destination safe ;) I expect that kind of price for them, I mean dual-layer blank discs are still not exactly cheap

If I burned 8X Riteks at 2X they often worked, but sometimes didn't. At 8X they're less reliable (not that they were reliable to begin with.)

If I burn Apples at 8X, they basically always work. Too bad Apple media costs so damn much. (Yes I'm aware that Apple doesn't make media, but it's clear they have strict QA requirements for those who do make their media.)

The easiest way to test this is to burn a high bitrate movie that is ~4.35 GB in size, and then try to play it in a picky DVD player. A picky DVD player will often have problems playing the end of the movie.

Cheap media tends to do a lot better if the disc is less than say 3.5 GB, or if the bitrate used for the movie is relatively low.