For most of you this will be a boring, dull, tedious and lifeless piece of writing but for those like me who bulk buy hundreds of blank discs each year (or month) and pretty much burn them faster than you would on a bonfire, getting the right blank media is a very important task. As a DJ i often burn mixes i did at home to play on the night, DVD's filled with folders of music, mix tapes, back ups and even word documents with lists of what song is on what CD... it gets frustrating then, to have rubbish discs, so here is my guide to buying some good ones.

I have already reviewed a fair few blank discs and am still continuing to so, so please take a look if you're still unsure after reading this.

@ Work Out what you want from a disc @

Do you want to burn media like movies and music? Do you want to just burn 10mb of word documents? if you just want to burn documents you just want some cheap CD-R's and done with it, but for DJ's burning music you dont want CD's that skip, have rubbish sound quality, or stop working completely after lightly brushing them leaving the worlds smallest scratch...

>> DURABILITY <<
TUFF DISC is a brand that has been around for a number of years if you want durability.

>> PHOTO'S/PRECIOUS DATA <<
DATAWRITE is a brand that i have known to give excellent buffering, and have never lost or corrupted data.

>> AUDIO <<
RIDISC is a brand which is classed as a AAA+ Burning quality and has given me uncompromised sound quality, even on 64KBPS mp3.

>> AUDIO & VIDEO <<
SONY is a brand which offers high quality audio playback like RiDisc but actually offers very high quality and high FPS video playback too.

>> GOOD VALUE & DOCUMENTS <<
TESCO offer the cheapest CD-R's i've ever seen. the sound quality is poor and audio skips regularly, video playback is not good. Ideal though for cheap throw away discs and documents (which are not that important if they corrupt that is)

@ A brief explanation of the +R -R ±R and RW formats @

+R DVD's are simply a write-once optical format with 4.7 GB of storage, used for non-volatile data storage or video applications.

-R DVD's and CD's are the generally accepted format by most DVD players and Pioneer did make a dual layer version in 2005 although the original discs came about in 1997 and hold 4.7GB of data.

±R and the ± symbol (plus or minus) is generally seen on spec lists and not on DVD/CD's and means the player can play both plus or minus type discs.

+, -, or ± RW Means the disc can be written over again and again although they do break eventually. Say if you don't want to keep buying discs you can burn then burn over the top later. These discs are much more expensive and if you are permanently burning photos or CD's its best NOT to choose RW format.

@ Disc Properties @

Choosing the amount of space is crucial for cramming lots of data onto a disc. For the odd document however, don't waste your money!

CD-R - Good for: Documents, mp3, music discs, small stuff
700MB - 80 MINS - CHEAPEST

DVD±R - Good for: movies, large files, lots of documents (thousands), MP3's, MP4's, Large data, software
4.7GB - 120 MINS - CHEAP

CD-RW Good for: See CD-R and Burn over and over to the same disc
SEE CD-R - AVERAGE

DVD-RW - Good for: see DVD-R + Burn over and over
SEE DVD-R - PRICEY

HD-DVD - Good for: HD Movies, vast number of documents and data
8-12GB - EXPENSIVE

Blu Ray - Good for: HD Movies, colossal number of documents, MP3's, most other media files
25 - 50 GB - INSANELY EXPENSIVE


The most common tubs available for each of these discs are 5, 10, 25, 50, 100 (You are unlikely to find 50 or 100 Blu-ray's though since you are looking at hundreds of pounds here.)

Drop me a dooyoo mail if you ever want to know about blank media, what is the cheapest and what you need etc, im happy to help. I know where you can get dirt cheap discs and very high quality ones. Thanks for reading.