[Coco] Brands Of Old Diskettes

[Torsten Dittel]

Bill Barnes schrieb:
> Hmmm, got some HP CDRs here, on a few burners I can burn at full rated speed, but on others, it has to be at a slower than rated speed or else some CD-ROM drives have issues reading them. Wonder if that is the same type of deal.

Regarding CDRs, besides there are better and worse qualities available 
(although most brands come from the same few fabrics, I guess the 
quality testing is more or less extensive) and this or that technology 
(gold, silver, azo, green, brown, etc.), I meanwhile got the idea, your 
CDR burner has to "know" the media to achieve good results. I have 
heard, when it all startet with 1x speed, the CD burners did some test 
burning on an unused part of the disc, to calibrate the laser power 
before burning the actual data (even before writing the lead in). 
Nowadays, it seems to try to recognize the brand (how ever that works) 
and to use some laser calibration preset, stored in the firmware. The 
older your burner, the less likely it is able to work with newer brands 
of madia without random result (might work, might not work). So you 
should always try to find the latest firmware for your drive. E.g. my 
good old YAMAHA F1 (the first one able to write nice holografic pictures 
on the unused border of the CDR), latest firmware, is working best with 
52x Verbatim DatalifePlus with SuperAzo coating burned at 16x, 
especially for Audio CDs.

Regards,
Torsten