I'm sorry to say that my experience with Ritek Ridata G04 has not been good at all -- and it really disappoints me after the truly overwhelming positive reviews on the media.
I bought a 50-pak for Ridata 4x a few days ago. Right off the bat -- the first disc off the top of the spindle failed to play in my DVD (Toshiba SD-K620)after a successful burn (Lite-On 4x DVDRW). The next disc was successful, but the one after that failed. After 8 discs, I had 4 coasters -- a 50% failure rate. Totally crushing. And they're G04's, alright -- I verified this with DVDInfo Pro. I'm exchanging the unused discs today for the Princo 4x's. The Princo's have performed better for me -- very surprising after reading the mostly lukewarm to negative reviews on the media.
I remember reading in another thread that Ritek had a period where they were releasing sub-standard product into the market, but I can't remember the timeframe.
I'd like to get some thoughts on this.
My experience with ritek/ridata has been nothing but positive-surely Taiwan's best DVDR manufacturer. I have heard of b-grade or even counterfeit Riteks being sold, (especially in the UK), so maybe that is the problem? It depends on where you buy it from.
I purchased them from a local distrubutor. I checked the media with DVDInfo and both the Princo's and the Ritek's are legit. I was able to exchange the unsused Ritek's (40 of them) for 20 Princo's (so far the frontrunner for me) and 20 Prodiscs (for testing). Prodiscs also got very high marks, and according to Supermedia, ranks as high as the Ritek G04.
Well, as luck would have it, the Prodiscs were as bad as the Riteks. The Prodisc didn't seem to pan out, either. All five of the discs that I tested failed. The data could not be read from the disk following burning. I even attempted a burn at 2x -- suspecting that perhaps a 4x burn was too much for the disc to handle. The 2x burn produced pretty much the same result. I ran a diag on the failed disc and found in upwards of 321 errors on it. There were more errors I'm sure, but I aborted my diag program before it could complete.
Why is it that whenever a Princo disc does badly, "oh Princo are crap" is the response, whereas whenever a Ritek does badly everyone says "oh they must be B-grade/counterfeit/bad writer" etc etc.
Riteks aren't universally compatible, and your writer clearly doesn't like them. If Princos work for you, stick with them.
Well, with my 451s, I have noticed that Riteks, although they do work OK, have quite high error levels (PI around 150-200, far higher than with a Pioneer burner). This is *with* the latest firmware.
Every drive has a preference for one brand or another; most drives work *okay* with Ritek discs and that is why they're recommended. But there will be drives out there which just don't like Ritek media. Just as there are CDRW drives that don't like Taiyo Yuden. One of those things.
