Imation Corp. CD-R 80 min > Reviews (5)

When purchasing my new laptop, which was years ago now, there was one important feature to me and that was that it had to be able to write to CD's because if there's one hobby I have, and one thing I love, it's music. Whilst we are in an age of MP3's where CD's don't really matter when CD's do come into play is at parties (can't have everyone crowded around one iPod) and also in cars. Now there's a lot of pressure when deciding what to put on a CD for my car, but my dash compartment is slowly starting to make a collection.

And what brand are these CD's? Well TDK CD-R80 of course! There's no brand I ever used, and at this very moment I don't think there's any need to change brand. Whilst the picture beside this review shows a case, I actually purchased about 50 of these CD's in one of those plastic see through cases where all the CD's are piled up on one another. You must know what I mean. If you don't, nevermind, I've taken a picture below. Whilst this does take away the advantage of having all the CD's in separate cases with their tracklistings written in them, it does save on cost and at the end of the day I don't mind having loose CD's in my car even if it does mean having difficulty telling between them. I really need to put marks on them to tell the difference between them.

TDK CD-R80's are a pretty light blue colour with three silver lines in the centre that get thicker the further left they go, they almost make a sort of tick symbol. Speaking of symbols, the TDK symbol is printed on the disc as well as the brand name. In smaller text below that is the name of the CD, 'CD-R80', and even smaller text below that it says that the disc can hold up to 700MB of memory or 80 minutes of music and goes up to a 52x speed. There's also confirmation printed on the disc that the disc is 'compact disc recordable'.

I've never had any faults burning music on to these discs that I weren't responsible for. Obviously when I first started making CD's I messed up a few times, which meant the discs had to be thrown out because you can't re-write over what you burn on to them. With the fact that I bought them in this bulk fashion though it means that throwing a couple out doesn't matter too much. 700MB is quite an outstounding amount of memory, definitly more memory than needs be on the CD's because songs aren't really that many MB's. On the other hand, 80 minutes really isn't that much. I find a lot of the time the CD has to be about 78/79mins as well, otherwise it won't record the last song.

Burning a CD takes about 20 minutes if I'm using up all 80mins of space, although I'd imagine this depends on the speed of your computer. My laptop is fairly old now and has problem after problem, so on a good new computer I wouldn't be surprised if it takes about a quarter of that time.

Obviously I haven't checked the back of every single CD I bought for scratches, because there's 50, although I've never noticed any damage on a new CD. I've even got CD's knocking about in my car without cases and they still play absolutely fine.

The quality of the CD's is just as good as it sounded when it was an MP3 on my computer, can't fault the standard of quality at all. How easy are you going to find it to burn to these? Well that all depends on how good you are at burning other CD's, presuming you don't know what you're doing it will probably take you quite a while. My preferred way of burning CD's is through Windows Media Player.

There is one problem I have came across with these CD-R80 (I'd imagine you understand the story behind the name now - 80 at the end because it carries 80 minutes) and that was when I put a CD in a fairy old Walkman it will sometimes have trouble loading songs, and you'll have to go forward to the next track and then go back to the same track and it will work. That could be because of the Walkman, but it doesn't do that with official CD's so I'd imagine it's something to do with the technology in that Walkman having trouble reading burnt CD's. Who uses Walkmans in this day and age anyway? ;o)

Overall, I can't fault the product because it has never done me wrong and I will swear by this product for a long time to come because well, I've got loads of them left. With CD technology becoming more and more dated, hopefully they become cheaper and cheaper meaning we can all make plenty and plenty of CD's with only the music we want to listen to on. No wonder CD sales are starting to fade, especially of CD's featuring multipul artists where there's only a few you actually like. You can now make your own CD's with ONLY artists you like.