Battleangel

A couple of weeks ago I came to the rather dire conclusion that I was running out of Kodak Ultima80 CDRs. For some reason you never plan ahead, and you realize the spindle is empty basically when you are down to the last five pieces. Now this might not seem like much of a problem - unless you are like me and desperately fear having to fix what is not broken (so to speak).

Kodak is among the top5 brands available here in Sweden in major quantities. Up until a couple of months ago at least, because it seems that they are downsizing their operation in the optical storage department. The search for an affordable, high quality (contradiction in terms?) replacement brand has started …

As everyone knows by now, the brand of a CDr and the actual manufacturer is almost never the same thing. After careful consideration I came to the conclusion that HP recently started buying un-branded discs from a certain Japanese company, well renowned in CDr circles. The discs are rated 16x (bs rating if you ask me) and are called C8000A.

From CDrIdentifier 1.63:

ATIP: 97m 24s 01f
Disc Manufacturer: Taiyo Yuden Company Ltd.
Reflective layer: Dye (Long strategy; e.g. Cyanine, Azo etc.)
Media type: CD-Recordable
Nominal Capacity: 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f / LBA: 359849)

Interesting part underlined. HP has chosen an aggressive price model, weighing in just below what Kodak discs used to cost in the good old days. The problem has been solved as far as I am concerned.