Digital Wanderer

   Not long ago I wrote about how my DVD blanks made by Verbatim wouldn't read right after burning.  Later it turned out that many of them, which read fine during verification right after burning, would stop reading after a week or two. As a result I got terribly angry and upset by the fact that I threw more than $60 down the drain - what kind of trust can there be for blanks where 1/3 become unreadable almost immediately?
  In the end I managed to persuade my sister  mistrale1514 to buy and send me for my birthday two 50-pack boxes of the best blanks in the world - made by the Japanese company Taiyo Yuden. Oh, how much this sound means to the heart of a knowledgeable person! The incredible quality of TY blanks has long become a cult and a legend. Blanks better than these simply do not exist - except maybe KODAK CD blanks, when they were still being made, and rare HP specimens.

   Next comes a story of why some blanks are better than others and how to tell. It isn't overloaded with technical details, so read on bravely if you're interested or just have nothing better to do.
  So, to start with I'll briefly explain the basic economic principles of the blank disc world. Optical media are produced by relatively few large corporations at their own factories. (Examples - Pprodisc, Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation, CMC Magnetics Corp.) But in stores we see a huge variety of different brand names. Why does this happen? The clever ones have already guessed that in blank manufacturing, just like everywhere else nowadays, globalization reigns supreme, or more precisely its manifestation in the form of OEM production. Just as ghostwriters chained in a dark basement worked day and night creating novels published under the name of Alexandre Dumas père, so hardworking Chinese and Taiwanese crank out tech gadgets that are then sold under cool brands like Sony, Philips, etc.
   This state of affairs suits everyone - the Chinese don't need much, and they take their cut through massive production volumes. Famous TNCs make a great killing selling thin air in the form of their brands, and putting a 2-3x markup on gadgets supplied to them by Asian manufacturers. In return they sort of control the quality, and the end consumer is perfectly happy getting a merely normal product at double the price.
  Taiyo Yuden is one of the prestigious OEM suppliers of CD/DVD blanks, whose services are used by titans like Sony and Plextor. Fortunately, Taiyo Yuden also sells blanks under its own brand, as many OEM manufacturers do.  Furthermore, unlike the Chinese and Taiwanese, TY doesn't play dirty games with the consumer. Let me explain what I mean.
 First, the quality of discs , produced by "the Chinese", is highly unstable. For their partners - eminent brands, they usually make excellent discs. For themselves (and their own brands) – passable quality. And for crowds of little-known sellers – either bad, or really bad.
 Second, quality can vary drastically from batch to batch, which is due to poor process control and using equipment way past its intended lifespan. They installed new machines, calibrated them, checked the quality - the batch is superb. But a year or two later they forget and don't give a damn - and you get pieces of useless plastic instead of optical media.
  Fourth, under the exact same brand can hide discs from completely different manufacturers. And while in the case of big-name companies like Sony this isn't scary due to quality control, small companies that don't manufacture, but only sell discs, often change their suppliers, which makes the quality completely unpredictable.
  Third, discs produced at factories of the exact same company, but in different countries, differ in quality like heaven and earth. A classic example is Verbatim, under whose brand are actually sold discs from several different manufacturers. Verbatim itself usually makes discs at Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation (MCC) factories, of which it is a part. But while the quality of Singapore factories is excellent, and Taiwanese - acceptable, the Indians churn out the most horrific garbage. And the cunning Verbatim sells low-quality discs only in third-world markets. Much to our sorrow, in Verbatim's opinion the ex-USSR clearly falls into that category. And the US and Europe mostly get the cream of the crop. I  that time ran into Made In India, and not Taiwan at all, which is so not very deservedly.
   So anyway - Taiyo Yuden is a Japanese company whose mind-blowing blanks (I'm definitely a robot) are sold under the names of Sony, Plextor, and a few others. For example, Verbatim produces a series called Verbatim Pastel, which are in fact exactly TY products. If you see them at a good price - buy without a second thought.
With this we end part one, the economic one.