Panasonic E85 and Emtec DVD-R

A

adrianl

Guest
Yesterday picked up a spindle of 50 Emtec DVD-R 1-4x for £17.99 in PC World sale. Usually their prices aren't competitive but they occasionally have good media offers.

Have searched this forum and one guy posted that he'd had 3 coasters out of 11 with this brand on E85!

Does anyone have any other experiences to confirm whether the poster had a bad batch, or that there is a general problem with Emtec discs on E85?

If the former I'll take it back for refund (no coasters up till now burning dozens of Imation DVD-R). If experiences more psoitive I'll pick up some more spindles before sale ends on 1st Feb!

Thanks for advice,

Adrian
 
Does anyone have any other experiences to confirm whether the poster had a bad batch, or that there is a general problem with Emtec discs on E85?
To be honest one posters bad experiences doesn't really indicate whether you will have trouble or not. For one thing you may have an E85 with a different OEM drive than his. Secondly Emtec is just a label and thus the discs themselves could have come from entirely different sources.

Your best bet is to try one or two and see how they perform. I assume you will be recording to your HDD first so there is no risk of losing recordings - but if you are direct DVD-R recording a good trick is to title the disc prior to recording. That way you get a good idea whether the disc will work before trying to record.
 
Rasczak said:
To be honest one posters bad experiences doesn't really indicate whether you will have trouble or not. For one thing you may have an E85 with a different OEM drive than his. Secondly Emtec is just a label and thus the discs themselves could have come from entirely different sources.

Your best bet is to try one or two and see how they perform. I assume you will be recording to your HDD first so there is no risk of losing recordings - but if you are direct DVD-R recording a good trick is to title the disc prior to recording. That way you get a good idea whether the disc will work before trying to record.

Sound advice and thoughts Rasczak. That's a really good tip on titling first too and saving time/grief!

Thanks,

Adrian
 
Glad to be of help!

That's a really good tip on titling first too and saving time/grief!
It is a good indicator. I should point out there are some instances where a recording that has been titled will still fail - but in my experience if it titles successfully then it will record without problems 95% of the time.
 
I bought some of those Emtec discs and have had loads of coasters on my pc DVD writer. They sometimes write ok but if I run a verify, they nearly always fail.

I have only tried 1 or 2 on the E85 and they seemed to have worked but I just don't trust them so I don't use them anymore.

Stuart
 
Thanks Stuart. I think I may get these refunded at PCWorld while still sealed...
 
As an aside '50 DVD-R for £17.99' isn't a partiicularly good price considering you can get 25 quite decen't DVD-R's for about 6 quid (online at svg), and if you want to go for something expensive and not online, you can get verbatums for about £10 for 25 at somewhere like office world..so not much more
 
The last Emtec DVD-R that I used sent my E85 into a state of apoplexy.. shutting down.. restarting.. shutting down etc. I binned the lot! I have found that Verbatim, Sony, Maxell and TDK (either 4x or 8x) have been the most reliable and out of 200+ now, I've not had one coaster. Verbatim are currently £6.70 + VAT for 25 at Ebuyer.
 
Well I returned the Emtecs. PC World was doing iMation 25 spindles for £9.99 down from £12.99 so I picked up a couple of these instead. I know it's not the cheapest but 40p/disc is still pretty good and I've not had a single problem with several dozen iMation dvd-r.
 

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