Maxell & TDK DVD-R quality & price ?
 

I recently bought 15 Maxell DVD-R's from Best Buy for 15.00 then I found out at COSCO the have TDK DVD-R 100 for 32.00. Are TDK's inferior?
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It all depends on the particular batch. TDK and Maxell both buy from a variety of manufacturers. So one batch may be from a good quality manufacturer, another batch might be from a real crap-ass manufacturer.

If you buy in the store, the only brand that actually manufactures their own product and has extensive quality control is Verbatim. In most cases all other brands just relabel stuff from OEMs you have never heard of - some good, some bad, but you can't tell from looking at the package.

If you buy online then you can look for Taiyo Yuden brand. They are one of the highest quality OEMs.

Gotta love succinct thread titles.

I think that TDK DVDs are excelent...but you need to find which brand is best for your burner

I agree with the previous poster.

I would ONLY trust and buy Verbatim as a store bought brand. However I always use and totally trust and love Taiyo Yuden. Even their Value Line is exceptional and I almost never have any disc-related problems with burning. Supermediastore is a good place to order them from.

I only use Sony, and have never had any problems at all, and I've played them on numerous players.

The "major" names shift their production from cheaper plant to cheapest plant. Quality varies widely even within these factories and they'll have several grades with different levels of acceptable errors. The best grades are usually reserved for the top contracts and the worst ones will go to the generic/no names. Then there's the issue of quality dropping from 8X to 16X and even within +R to -R. Even Sony and Fuji no longer make their discs in Japan (which made them the Cadillacs of DVDRs). Having said that I find even the cheapest ones are fine for non-critical archiving; burn at a slow speed to insure best results and utilize DVDIdentifier to extract more hidden info from blank discs like true manufacturers name, built in errors, etc.

They have them buy one get one free with coupon this week.

I bought the Costco TDK DVD+R and DVD-R last year. Returned the +R because the quality of burns was atrocious. I kept the -R but its quality was marginal for the $22 per 200 price. I'm just going to use them for short term storage.

I've never even bothered to buy Maxell as it's a complete crapshoot as to what you'll get.

http://www.videohelp.com/dvdmedia?dv...+or+List+Media

TDK looks about the same in terms of who actually manufactures the media from spool to spool. I prefer finding good media that I know will still be good when I need more of it.

i had alot of bad experience with maxell about 10 years ago (back in the day where you had to look at the disk color, gold = crap, blue and green were good) and since then, have pretty much avoided them.
corrie bought me a spindle of maxell dvdrw recently.. and the burn quality sucked.. most of them burned fine the first time.. but by the 2nd burning, not many were readable in my dvd player anymore.

im not real picky in media.. because most work just fine for me.. but maxell and sony have always been crap in my experiences.

if i had to pick a brand.. i always go verbatim (mis > mii & mis > usa).. otherwise, whatever is on sale (with few exceptions).

TDK . Never a prob. but, I am looking for a really good deal on some duel layer disks. any ideas ?

I'd say watch OfficeMax in the future. You missed a good deal last week. They had 20pk dual layer Verbatims for $24.99.

I'm still a Verbatim guy after all these years, never needed to look elsewhere.

As far as the major brands go, I've used tons of TDK over the years and never had a problem.

Stay away from Memorex. I had a whole spool of CD-R's that weren't readable right after burning. Like twikoff, I had a few bad experiences with Maxell a long time ago, and have steered clear since.

If you can afford it Taiyo Yuden are great. And I've used only Verbatim's for DVD DL media, and those are great too.

I've had the best luck with Memorex DVD-R as far as movies go (backups).

Right now a 50-pack is $12.99 at Best Buy.

TYS or VERBS.thats it

This deal is back this week at OM. Just make sure you get ones made in Singapore.

Just got back from my local OM. No +Rs in stock & all of the -Rs were made in Taiwan. Dang.

I just tried to watch something on a TDK that was burned about 1 1/2 years ago and it would freeze up every 5 minutes or so although at some points it was able to continue on its own. Into the trash it went. So much for TDK.

That's the second biggest complaint about quality:
#1. If your burn doesn't fail immediately then...
#2. You still have to consider how long the dyes may last.