Buying DVD printables.

[ukracer]

I used to buy Ritek before i switched to using lightscribe. Now you cant get lightscribe laser discs any more i am having to start using white printables again.

Its been that many years and i am sure the old dies have worn out i was wondering what brands people are finding reliable now.

Probably off ebay so a reliable source would be good. I was going to a computer fair tommorow but cant see the point in paying 4 quid entry just to get 100 DVD's.

 

[Seadog]

There's still quite a few available on eBay.

 

[WorkshopChris]

This has just got me thinking i in all honestly can not remember the last time i burnt a dvd, everything goes on a usb stick, hard drive or cloud.
I think the last time was a boot disk for a os operating system.
I remember using lightscribe with limited success at one point.

 

[DAPPH]

I recently threw away four x 50 unused packs of DVD.s for the same reason as well as finding quite a few had a strange milky discoloration on them.

I'm in the process of putting every CD of pictures , scans and business records on a stand alone 500 gig hard drive & copying it to a cloud provided via PC world.

I found quite a few of the hundreds of CD's full of pictures I'd taken this last 20 years had degraded and could not be read . So I've been extracting what I can whilst I can to my stand alone hard drive & the cloud .
My OS boot is on a cloud too , simple enough to extract it using another comyter and popping it on a big memory stick .

A guy at PC world I was talking with informed that quite a few 2019 range of computers will not have a DVD / CD apparatus in them .
This was also the main reason I decided to put stuff on the stand alone HD & on the cloud .
Now I'm slowly getting into 3D hot melt plastic printing and CAD drawings it makes even more sense to not have stuff on a DVD .

 

[ukracer]

Now I'm slowly getting into 3D hot melt plastic printing and CAD drawings it makes even more sense to not have stuff on a DVD .
.

Why is that then??

 

[ukracer]

There's still quite a few available on eBay.

Lightscribes??? Last time i looked they were extortionate. Lol

 

[ajlelectronics]

Why is that then??

Because he might hot melt the DVDs?

 

[DAPPH]

No not quite . I foresee the size of the files being bigger than the DVD's as well as my DVD's showing signs of degrading / discolouring and delaminating over 20 years .
Plus you don't get scratches on HD's and clouds like can happen on a DVD /CD .

Whilst I have a hand held rejuvenator for scratched CD's 7 DVD's it wasn't any use in bringing the damaged ones back to life & in a lot of cases not much use polishing out any surface scratched in the protective layer on each side of the disc's .


The other thing is.... having several compartmented wooden boxes 400 x 400 x 60 of so deep holding 60 CD's or DVD's in their original or a jewel cases took up a lot of room that could be usefully filled with other things .
Should there be a fire in my home , they get stolen or a massive flood ( I'm at 115 mtr above sea level )
It could be the case that they are lost for ever . On a decent commercial cloud that's not currently the case, as most clouds are duplicated and frequently cross referenced /reviewed in three or more sites set up in different places around the globe.

During these reviews & cross referencing any slight imperfections found at any cloud site are interrogated and tidied up to bring things back to the original data input standard . I'm not sure how often the review/ repair is done but feel it is done at a frequency that you are willing to pay for .
IE
Ultra High speed data storage costs more and has very frequent reviews & updates similar to a banks critical data input that gets reviews & updates every few minutes 24/7

 

[gaz1]

i still use ritek discs also print them as well mines been epson printer with a ciss system connected to it

if i couldnt get it at my local it was online only for them but i boght by the 200 or 500 discs

 

[Seadog]

View attachment 159893
Lightscribes??? Last time i looked they were extortionate. Lol

About £2 a piece fot Verbatim.

 

[tflnemesis]

Just as an aside about damaged discs, I have had some limited success with damaged discs where the reflective coating and the paint has started to chip and flake off.

This is just to get the disc to read so you can get the information off.
I used the foil wrapper from a kitkat either taped or glued shiny side down on the top of the disc. A little PVA is usually enough to glue it down, trying to avoid getting glue on the area that has flaked off.
This is a last resort type fix as it unbalances the disc and if used more than once will likely introduce significant wear into your cd/dvd drive internals and/or cause the disc to shatter or get heavily scratched if it is really unbalanced.

I would say over the years i have had about a 75% success rate doing this and as it was usually for customers who have only the one disc with no backup, some very grateful customers .

 

[Olderisbetter]

Im so old i can remember a single DVDr costing £4

 

[WorkshopChris]

Im so old i can remember a single DVDr costing £4

I can remember spending hours stuck in front of a win95 machine feeding it a huge pile of 1.4Mb floppies to load a cad program for hours.