Archive for the ‘Recordable CDs’ Category
Taiyo Yuden has recently released a new silver inkjet printable watershield recordable CD. It features a hub printable glossy silver surface and all the benefits of Taiyo Yuden's Water Shield CD. Designed for inkjet disc printers it dries very fast avoiding smudges. It is 52x compatible and comes packaged in 50 disc spindles.
Taiyo Yuden Watershield offers water resistance, glossy finish and an amazing silver print surface. Like regular silver inkjet printable CDs the surface has a iridescent depth unlike any other CD printable surface. Silver gives a reflective three dimensional image highlighting the color of the label. Silver surfaced printable discs looks better then a silk screened disc. Color mixing is incredible with Taiyo Yuden Watershield recordable CD discs.
Inkjet printable Taiyo Yuden Watershield provides an excellent method of disc printing using convenient ink-jet printing technology. Taiyo Yuden Watershield is ideal for printing with the leading disc printer manufacturers including Epson, Microboards, R-Quest, Primera, Rimage, MF Digital and Recordex.
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It is interesting to note that Digitimes had an article on Thursday, August 7, 2008 about the Optical Recordable Disc manufacturer, Prodisc, with CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R and Dual Layer production lines in Taiwan and mainland China, clarifying it's position about the "rumors" that they were discontinuing optical disc product.
company chairman Ming-fa Lin:
""..Prodisc has invested more than NT$10 billion (about US$300 million) in production equipment of blank CD-R, DVD+/-R discs and has maintained a steady client base consisting of international vendors and overseas retail channels, the reason for not quitting production, Lin explained. Prodisc is negotiating with lending banks to seek their support for the company's planned turnaround and continuing production of optical discs.."
As reported by Digitimes IT news
This is after a report a day before in cens.com that Prodisc would be exiting the Optical business.
Essentially Prodisc is without capital and has plenty of troubles with Philips. It certainly would not be in Philips interest for Prodisc to exit the business although the issue is really with recordable CD production which is not as large a market as DVD which is not under the Philips royalty. The real issue is with the razor thin gross profits that translate into a loss every year and yet CMC, Ritek and Prodisc keep slugging it out. It's hard to imagine how Prodisc can continue but then it's hard to see how any of the Taiwan Optical manufacturers can continue. They continue to drop the cost of blank discs even though the manufacturing costs keep going up leaving no profit at all. They all are scrambling to shift over to other storage products like USB flash and flash cards. Prodisc has been working on a film production project producing brightness enhancement film (BEF) as well as LED lamps and aspherical polycarbonate ophthalmic lenses with a Japanese company, Omron.
These are the major manufacturers of inexpensive recordable CD-R, recordable DVD, and at least for CMC and Ritek: Blu-ray recordable manufacturing. They have driven the market hard in OEM and branded media making it a very non-economical operation. I'm certainly amazed that Prodisc would invest 300 million dollars for production equipment expecting a return on the investment.
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According to Digitimes Prodisc is planning to discontinue CD-R production. This is the continuing saga of the Philips action against several Taiwan CD-R manufacturers over royalty payments.
CMC, Ritek and Prodisc have been in negotiation with Philips since last year when the last license ran out. Digitimes had pointed out that the troubles for Prodisc really started with them publicly
protesting how unfair the royalty program is. Philips requested and received a request to seize assets of Prodisc in Taiwan which includes a manufacturing facility and money in a bank account.
Stay Tuned
This is a link to the full story Digitimes article
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There is a new manufacturer of CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R, Dual Layer and Blu-ray (BD-R) called Falcon Technologies International.
FTI is a new bred of recordable disc manufacturer with an eye on consistanly superior printable surfaces in both thermal printable and inkjet printable discs.
I have printed a lot of discs and I was blown away by the color reproduction with our HP based CD printer. Unlike Taiyo Yuden, Falcon has a phthalocyanine based dye that appears as a silver gold on the burning side. Swiss and Japanese engineers.
There has not been a lot of choices out there (outside of Taiwan). Don't get me wrong Taiwan is a great but the "big three" have been caught in non-profitable struggle for a few years and consistency has been an issue. All depends on who they are making the product for and at what price. There is a saying in many languages that you can have cheap or you can have quality but you can't have both ;) CMC, Ritek and Prodisc are the "big three". Lot's of second tier manufacturers (smaller operations, some better, some worse). There has been a lot of consolidation in recordable CD-R media and recordable DVD industry. Imation has taken over TDK production except for Blu-ray and the magnetic tape group. Most of the brands you know are actually OEM'd to the big three or a combination of second tier manufacturers in China and Taiwan. It's really an economy of scale solution.
So with great excitement I have been running Falcon Technologies CD and DVD recordables through their paces. It costs a little more and you are not going to find it at your
local paperclip store just yet but if you need some good printable recordable discs then Falcon Media is the way to go. The product is engineered with quality as the number one priority.
Easy to say I know. They really do it.
manufacturer site:
http://www.falconrak.com
Reseller:
http://www.cddimensions.com
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I can not tell you how many times I have heard "I want good quality recordable CDs and a cheap price". What does that mean? How do you determine quality CDs and a cheap price? I mean they are polar opposites of each other. So where does this perceived cheap good quality media come from?
Well I can answer that: Nowhere.
Indeed there is always a story behind the "deals" that are out there. Funny how they are not for "name brand CD-Rs" but generic (or store brand) type products.
The truth is there are a very limited amount of CD-R manufacturers left in the world. I don't even think they would fit on five fingers if you get my point: most media is manufactured by three companies: CMC, Ritek and Prodisc. How can that be? you ask. As profits have shrunk on CD-R disc manufacturing more and more companies have gone out of business or switched over to manufacturing DVDs which is perceived to generate more revenue. So all the brands one sees out in the market are produced by "the big three". There are several manufacturers who do not fall into this realm (although some do share manufacturing with the big three). So we have a lot of brands all made by the same companies and quality is defined by the formula holder. So let's say TDK, which has not made CD-R media in some time and is now just a name owned by Imation (at least in the CD and DVD recordable world...they are manufacturing recordable Blu-ray). Imation specifies how the product is to be made. Generally the quality is good when it's based on a known standard but there are many ways that this can become an issue. What becomes of the rejects from manufacturing?
Simple: they are sold as generic or sold to the highest bidder who then turns around and sells it to unsuspecting customers. Sometimes the grade B product is OK and sometimes it's really bad. Inconsistent and from the start a sub-standard disc. Considering it costs .10 to manufacture a recordable CD (I admit that the big three have been dumping at .09 and why they have not made any profit in some time) it would very suspect to be able to purchase shiny silver recordable CDs in the .10-.13 range at a retail level. Unless it's grade B or C. Garbage in, Garbage out. Put a printable surface on it, adds a penny to five cents depending on the quality of the print surface. Now one other issue putting quality aside is that CD recordable media is all under patents. Philips is the major stake holder as well as Taiyo Yuden. There are others too. Royalties have to be paid and most manufacturers pay the royalty except for several Taiwan companies that have been disputing the royalty as unfair because that would mean they would have to compete with other manufacturers who actually pay the royalties. They pay sometimes and other times they don't. Lately they have not so we see a lot of that media drying up. That is not to say that some still slips into the U.S. but the product does not have royalties paid and is a liability to all that sell it and buy it. I remember when several very large "resellers" were fined and several smaller resellers were put out of business when Philips got serious the last time.
That is the real reason why we pay more for "legal" product and less for product that violate US and international patent laws. Again quality aside. Now let's look at the components of a recordable CD so we understand the economics.
The polycarbonate substrate (the plastic disc without anything on it): Optical grade, Usually virgin poly. Of course toss some recycled plastic in and you have a cheaper disc. How thick is the disc? hey look I can make it half the thickness of the standard and I have saved money!
Next comes the organic dye layer. This is the photosensitive layer (sensitive to red laser light) that some people refer to as "burning". This layer when exposed to the correct wave length of light produces a darker spot, imitating a pit that is pressed into a CD-ROM disc. Less dye less dark and then the issue of dye stability (that's what makes or breaks you being able to read a disc 2 weeks from today).
Next comes the reflective layer. This is the "silver" or gold coating that makes it easier (or possible) to read the disc. If the layer is too thin then we start to have issues. This is an engineered spec. balancing readability and economy. As with all manufacturing when economy out ways quality then we have junk (or a store with a lot of smiley faces around...not naming any names).
The possible final coating is lacquer on a shiny silver disc or an additional layer for an inkjet printable surface. Some manufacturers actually put a scratch resistant surface between the lacquer and printable surface or just the scratch resistant surface on the recordable CD-R. This is a step for quality as the most vulnerable part of a CD-R is it's top surface, not the recording side which is the plastic substrate. A scratch into the top surface can destroy a disc.
The higher the standard the better quality the disc is in multiple points. If what you are recording is garbage then by all means use garbage media. Trying to save a penny or two is like buying a retread tire.
There certainly are deals out in retail land for CD recordable media. Understanding what is a deal and what is garbage media is the key to any decision to purchase. If you purchase by price alone then you may be in for a rude awakening one day when you insert your favorite recordable CD (always the one you can't replace) and it skips, or just errors out. If you are like me I store my travel CD discs in the car which goes from zero degrees fahrenheit in the winter to 120 degrees in the summer. I ...
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