Verbatim 95355 UltraLife 4.7 GB 8x Gold Archival Grade DVD-R, 50-Disc Spindle by VERBATIM CORPORATION
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Digital camera reviews of Verbatim 95355 UltraLife 4.7 GB 8x Gold Archival Grade DVD-R, 50-Disc Spindle
Digital camera Review: Better than Delkin Archival Gold
Summary: 5 Stars
Having used Delkin Archival Gold DVD's I find that Verbatum only had two bad discs out of 100 where Delkin ran closer to 20% bad. Much better price point with Verbatum.Digital camera Review: Beware of Macs
Summary: 1 Stars
I have a macbook pro from last year and an imac from 2 years ago and these discs don't work with either. I'm still troubleshooting. They probably work with brand new macs, I guess.Digital camera Review: Excessive failure rate
Summary: 2 Stars
I've experienced 4 failures to burn in 20 attempts with these archival DVDs. Also, even one of the 'successes' had a small surface defect. To me, this moots any archival advantages -- big disappointment!
By comparison, the Archival Gold CD-R have given excellent service, with no burn failures in over 30 discs. The CD-Rs do not appear to have the anti-scratch coating, so perhaps this is part of the problem with the DVD-R version.
Digital camera Review: Expensive and Stable
Summary: 5 Stars
The reason you should be looking at these DVD blanks is to make archival storage discs. Regular DVD's, or really inexpensive ones, are reported to have a very short life after burning - even if you store them properly - even in the one or two year range. It's been reported that these Gold foil DVD blanks will last longer. There is also evidence that says the Taiyo Yuden blanks last a very good long time. The blanks do appear to be tougher than my usual Sony discs, but I didn't do any Brillo pad tests.
I purchased these Verbatim blanks to back up some irreplacable video files, which had been converted from VHS to DVD. What can be said about the 24 I burned, they burned beautifully, were extremely high contrast when you look at the business side of the disc, and play on every single DVD player we've ever thrown at these. There wasn't a single coaster burn in the set (my coaster rate using Sony DVD blanks is around 1 in 100). I've burned maybe 3 or 4,000 DVD's on every imaginable brand of DVD, and these are the sharpest looking burns I have ever seen.
On longevity, well that's almost impossible to comment on today. Verbatim says some incredible number of years. Nobody should ever believe that claim, dyes just cannot last that long. But they should be good until the next storage media arrives.
One sensitive point with DVD blanks is the reflective layer behind the dye layer. Most are aluminum, which if ever exposed to air, will tarnish and lose reflectivity rendering the disc useless (depending of course on the location of that tarnish). These Verbatim discs avoid that problem from ever happening, gold will not tarnish and lose it's reflectivity.
What a person really has to consider when they look at a digital archive strategy, is using multiple back up places. DVD's can fail over time, or become unreadable. I don't subscribe to the format nonsense or scare tactics many like to toss around about incompatible reading formats where drives to read a particular media will cease to exist. A person can still get 5 1/4 inch floppies converted to other formats (8.5 inch discs are almost impossible to convert now), and that size floppy has been gone for well over 10 years now (if you were asleep for 10 years you could still get that data off those floppies). In the case of these irreplaceable movie files, I chose to use these Verbatim discs. Made three copies of each DVD on Taiyo Yuden blanks for day to day viewing (they are lacquer based discs and are so optically flat that you can see all the way to the bottom of a 100 spindle through the center - they are also about 1/4 the price). I saved the Video_TS folders on two separate hard drives, one of which is only turned on to copy to or from for critical backups. And one day I will copy all these files up to a service like Mozy. I will then have 5 separate copies in three different physical locations. Ah most would say overkill, but these are important files. I'm following the exact same strategy for my 25,000 digital images.
These are without question excellent DVD blanks. In my experiece I've never seen a better blank for critical archival work. They are expensive, but they are cheaper on a per gigabyte basis than a hard drive. If they last 1/4 of the 100 years Verbatim claims, I'd be super happy. Just remember, hedge your bets with critical files - put them in multiple places on different media.
Digital camera Review: Fail rate and scratch problem
Summary: 2 Stars
Was looking ot archive important photos so I shelled out for these since Verbatim have a good rep.
I've tried 7 so far and 2 failed during the burn. Cheap manufacturing disappointed me.
Also tested out the scratch guard on the failed ones (they are already failed so why not, right?) the scratch proof layer is almost non-existent. it feels a little tougher but my stapler scratches it easily. My fingernails wont scratch it though but my fingernails don't scratch regular CD's easily either. So I can tell there is an extra protective layer but a very thin one. Maybe I should have gotten some other brand.