Advantages: Excellent Thermal Stability, Excellent Quality
Disadvantages: You pay slightly more, but it's worth it.

...two years, but i still haven't found one up to the quality of Verbatim, so thats what i always recommend to everyone. It also seems to have a very good compatibility rating with most hardware. I buy most of mine at Ebuyer, since they tend to be cheap and offer a large stock. I would suggest you buy in either 50 or 25 packs for DVD-+R or 25 or 10 packs for DVD-+RW, as this significantly increases the value for money. I have a lot of home videos, and i wouldn't trust them to be stored on anything but Verbatim, they're too precious, that's how much i trust the media. You can now also get printable DVD's which are compatible with a lot of todays photo printers, great for creating lasting memories. Take it from me, a physicist, buy Verbatim and you won't be let down.... Read review

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Advantages: Good quality, nice price, oooh a spindle
Disadvantages: same as most dvd-rw's

...around the spindle with the usual information on that is usually on products. At the front you have the Imation logo, with a DVD disc next to it, and DVD-RW in big letters next to that. Over on the right side of the front part of the label, it says that there is 25 in the pack. The colours that are on the label are red and grey to keep it simple. Cases… Because these discs are on a spindle they don't come with any cases (which is the only disadvantage of these discs), so you will have to purchase them separately, but that isn't really any big deal. They can be bought at quite a reasonable price in stores such as PCWorld. Discs… The discs are simply silver and white. The information that is on the disc is the usual for a CD-R or a DVD-R. E.g. the make, speed. I like to stick the labels that you get with blank cassettes on these to mark... Read review

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Advantages: Can be moved from PC to PC, lighweight, robust, reliable, fast
Disadvantages: None so far...

...as Roxio on my system. The company was true to their word - the program landed on my doormat the very next day. So it looked like Freecom had excellent customer service also. Since then I have upgraded my system to Windows XP and now have a choice to use Roxio or Nero. There are slight differences between the two programs - each have their pros and cons. What does it do? An additional facility that impressed me with this player was that it would also be used to back up 4.7GB of any computer files on a standard DVD disk or up to 8.5GBs on a duel layer DVD disk. So even if I never used it for creating videos, I would have a massive back-up facility for my hard drive. In fact, the first thing I used it for was to back up the entirety of My Documents on two DVD+RW standard disks. As mentioned earlier, using Nero or Roxio, it can... Read review

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Advantages: High DVD/CD compatibility after firmware update, it's Pioneer need another reason?
Disadvantages: Before flash update the drive sucks, 4 speed is dated now

...drive, the retail drive is called DVR-A05 and it's basically the same but with more extras than the OEM and costs more to. What's the extras? The A05 would get bundled software MyDVD Video Suite 4 and Instant CD/DVD v6.5, 1x DVD-R and 1x DVD-RW discs, 1x IDE cable, instruction manual, warrantee card and a shiny retail box. The OEM just gets Instant CD/DVD v6.5, but hey it's cheaper for a reason right? The instruction manual needs a little help, but at least it's concise and straight to the point of what you need to do with it. Why are instructions always in black and white for PC stuff? How fast is this drive? 4x write to DVD-R, 2x write for DVD-RW, 16x write for CD-R, 8x write for CD-RW, 32x read for CD and 6x read for DVD. It can churn out DVDs in about 15 minutes (very fast compared to the 1x drives that do it in over 1 hour), and CD... Read review

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Advantages: Reliable media to burn to
Disadvantages: nothing

...These are defiantly the best DVD+RW to get. They have a very high burn speed (4x) and every time i burn to it at max, it always works. It is easy to add more to the DVD (multi session) and erasing them takes no time. 2 mins on my drive. You can keep burning and erasing them. some products ive tested say they can do it 50 to 100 times but they all LIE!!! This DVD is still going past 50. It seems, to stop it, you have to break it. but the disc is going. It has a nice silver bottom (to burn to) and the top has a nice gold finish. You cannot however write anything on to it without a permanent pen. ball points do not seem to work well on it. The top is quite scratch resistant and the bottom depends on what you put it into. (PS2s really scratch up DVDs but if you use it in a PC, then it seems like no scratches). The case... Read review

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Advantages: Records to DVD's, Very fast
Disadvantages: No bells and whistles

...for each type of media, so listen closely. It reads DVD ROMS (That’s movies, games, any manufactured DVD’s) at 12x DVD speed. It reads DVD +/- R at 8x and DVD RW (that’s the re-writable versions of either format) at 6x, CD ROM and CD R at 40x CD speed and CD-RW at 32x. Remember that the stated DVD speeds are always faster than the CD speeds, because DVD x 1 is a lot faster than CD x 1. Now, it writes DVD + R up to 8x, DVD – R up to 4x, DVD + RW up to 4x and DVD – RW up to 2x. I have no idea why all the speeds are different, but they are. It seems this recorder favours the DVD + format. But again, remember, these are a lot faster than the numbers look for the DVD’s. As an example, running at 2.4x speed, it will fill up an entire 4.7GB DVD in about 20, 25 minutes. That includes verifying the data! -------------- Price... Read review

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Advantages: Great reputatioon, large storage capacity
Disadvantages: Half of them didn't work

...I have been buying this brand for ages, and was always a big fan. They are more expensive than some other brands, like memorex, but I thought they were worth the extra. They were reliable, burned well (no coasters as people say) and you could always tell by looking at them that they were good. This is the first time I've bought this particular type - with two recording layers they are supposed to offer you almost double the capacity on a single side, so you can get almost 4 hours of DVD -enough for even the most enthusiastic home movie maker! Well that's true, and the one's I got to work, worked fine, but lots didn't work. One you could see when I took it out of the box it was all bubbled on the surface, so I didn't even try to burn that one. And of the pack of 10 I bought, 3 so far have not worked out of 7 I've used... Read review

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Advantages: Plays divx,avi,mpeg straight from dvd or cd
Disadvantages: flimsy disc holder

...Don't go and buy any DVD player until you have read this review! Basically this DVD player is a mutli-region DVD and DIVX player, 'so what' I hear you say? Well how about this: it plays DVD, DVD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD+R, CD-R,CD+R, CD-RW,VCD, AUDIO CD, SVCD,MP3-CD,MP3-DVD,PCM,JPEG-CD,JPEG-DVD,VOLBS-OGG Not only this but it is compatible with: JPEG, Divx 3.11, Divx 4.X, Divx 5.x, MP3, WMA, AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, M-PEG-4, PCM and XVID This DVD Player also has the following features: Full function remote control, PAl and NTSC playback, Dolby Digital, DTS, Different selectable screen formats, Multi speed fast forward and rewind, slow motion and multi level zoom, Global motion compensation (GMC) and more besides. After reading this on a website I took the plunge and bought one.I paid £76.99 inc vat. The player arrived three... Read review

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Advantages: Reliable,fast write speed,printable,good brand
Disadvantages: None yet

...media, rated as 48x writing. This means that those of you with a reasonably new CD-writer can make use of it's fast write speed, myself included. It doesn't mean though, that those with an older writer, can't use them - you can of course, but at a slower speed than me (down to 1x speed). 700Mb is a lot of space. I can store around 300 5 megapixel digital files, or maybe 175 MP3's - and using my writer can do this in around 4 minutes. If you are using these disks for music storage to be played on a standard CD-player, you can fit 80 minutes, however Verbatim offer a MusicLife product, particularly suited to this type of storage. You are of course not limited to storing what I have mentioned, you can backup anything you want. These disks come with full jewel cases, packed in boxes of 10, but again other options are available. Each one... Read review

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Advantages: Portable, works well with CDs and some DVDs
Disadvantages: Doesn't burn well with poor quality DVDs. Fairly Bulky. Long time to charge battery. Not always reliable

...and a 1GB Lexar Professional Compact Flash memory card. The first time I used Imation DVD-RW 4x (ID number OPTODISKW004) and it was rubbish. My files did not copy onto the DVD properly and as a result I could not copy them onto my computer. If I had been on holiday I would have lost a bunch of photographs. I then tried Verbatim DataLifePLus DVD-R 8x (ID number TYG02) and didn't have a problem. At a write speed of 8x it took 25-30 minutes to burn about 1GB of data. Although their instructions say that you can burn on more than one occassion to a disk this did not work for me. You will notice that I have given the ID Number of the DVDs. This is because you can't judge the quality of a DVD by its brand name. You have to dig deeper and find out who produced it. There is a website called digitalfaq which has a great discussion... Read review

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