@ About & Build Quality @

I bought 300 of these discs and I mainly use them for bootable files for my PC and taking them to work. I bought them because they were so cheap, and on offer. The discs themselves are no thinner than any other CD-R and are not too flimsy. They do have some give and can flex a little bit but they aren't stiff. Dropping them from a few feet onto a laminate floor will not break them but can chip the disc. They are not at all scratch resistant either so sliding them along coarse surfaces or flipping them around in your hands with other CDs will scratch them, and these can be quite large scratches.

The top of the CD has a silver plastic film over the top of it and if you start to scrape away at it, eventually it will come off. However one thing I do like about the top layer is that the there is a lot of space to write things, and there are lines provided for you to write notes and title of the disc. The space available and the Tesco label both appear on the top of the disc.

@ Burn Quality & Playback @

I have had a few bad burns before and all of them were caused by buffer under run failure. Basically the poor build quality of the layer on the disc which the laser will burn to, has mistakes and glitches in the lines where the content is burned to, so the discs can't buffer, and burning over these errors will cause problems with audio on audio CDs and further corrupt files on data CDs.

On CDs that do burn correctly though the playback is quite average. Sound quality is not perfect on audio CDs where bass is flat and tinny with no peaks of high hats which sound hollow and not as sharp as they should. The good thing with Data discs though is that the CDs are fast to access and I have never had any problems with transferring files from the disc to a computer. The discs are able to quickly transfer files without any problems or errors,and I have never had a file that was unable to transfer.

Burning to the discs can be up to 52x but I strongly recommend using a much slower burn. For example, 32x. These discs can do 52x speed burns so they are not lying, but the discs do screw up and fail burns at this speed, and they are not built for it.

@ Overall @

These discs are cheap, and you get exactly what you pay for, low quality build, and low quality playback for audio. If you want these as data CDs for your computer then by all means get them because they are fantastic for this purpose but for audio, these are a NoNo. And regardless of what you want them for: burn them much slower than 52x