After examining the new Ritek disc from Datawrite I find a subtle difference between this and the v1 yellows: the color is a different shade of yellow - more like a "Coleman's" yellow and the wife likened it to something that appeared in a baby's nappy.
The printing on the disc is the stencil cut-out of the silvery/gold media surface. This type of printing will avoid any likelihood of these discs ever being overprints.
Well that's the appearance over and I cannot say I am over impressed but let's see how they perform!
My initial burn was in my Pioneer 107 with a title set of my test movie and this took around 15 minutes to burn at 4x speed resulting in a good disc that is compatible with all my DVD players.
I have now burnt about 20 of these discs in my Pioneer 105, 106 and 107 burners and the disc playback compatibility is good even in my old Mustek player. The discs give positive chapter skipping and smooth playback without any signs of freezing.
The discs are compatible over my full range of players and the speed graphs produced are good with some just dropping off slightly at the top end.
I tested the disc for record ability at 6x and 8x to find that 8x speed burning produced errors which is expected in view of the fact the RITEK have downgraded the RITEKG04 media so as to inhibit recording at the high speed. This is not limited to the Datawrite media but to all the RITEKG04 media produced and one can only assume that this is to force consumers to purchase the dearer 8x media (although this is now at a very reasonable price).
6x burning produced a good burn and although I have only burnt 1 disc at 6x I would expect similar results from future burns.
I have started to use DVDInfoPro3 for my PI/Jitter scans and these discs produce some of the lowest error graphs I have so far.
The program is still in the development stage so the graphs accuracy is not yet calibrated but with PI error rates of about 50 and 12% jitter. I compare these results with 1136 PI & 16.5% jitter of another media and compared with VERBATIM at 20 PI and 12.6% jitter.
With these results the disc must go up into the same class as Verbatim and are certainly amongst the best media I have tested so far with this program.
I have scanned numerous samples of this disc and here is one of the latest:
Conclusion
This disc is indeed a major upgrade for Datawrite having finally decided to produce their classic disc with the RITEKG04 dye. This is the disc I would personally go for in wanting a quality media at a very economical price - just a pity about the color but you cannot have it all ways.
