espn said:I vote for Plextor if you can afford them, else TDK is just about fine
Disc that burn by Plextor are more reliable because it is very picky. If you try to use lower grade disc, a plextor drive will probably reject it or force you to burn at slower speed. It can be good and bad, good is that the disc is less likely to have errors. Bad is you need to spend more $ to get branded media
But for brand like TDK, their firmware usually are optimised such that it can write on cheapo media as well, rather than reject the disc totally or force it to write at lower speed. The burn quality will not be compromised becase they will get all the different media available in the region to find out the best method to burn for each brand. However, cheapo media has inconsistent quality, so there will be certain risk if you want to use them.
For me, I have both branded and cheapo media at home. Branded media for backup of important data and cheapo media to burn photo or data for distribution
