One of the newsgroups at work pointed out this NIST study on CD-R reliability. This sort of thing is amazingly like what I spend a large part of my time doing, except on other products. I found it very illuminating in all aspects except that it doesn’t identify the CD-Rs and DVD-Rs by manufacturer name! Hence it is useless unless you happen to know which one uses which dye materal. Bah! Maybe I will go figure it out… The info has to be out there somewhere…. EDIT: Ok, it looks like the most likely brands with the Phthalocyanine dyes (the one that scored best) and gold coating are Mitsui, Ritek, Acer and Ricoh (and possibly Kodak). Note the big corallary here that they have to have a GOLD coating as well as be Phthalocyanine to be proof against both light and heat and humidity. Incidentally, these types of CDs seem to be a bit more expensive from what I can tell, ranging from $1.50/cd to ~$0.60/cd. One last note, it seems that Phthalocyanine CDs are more picky about the laser power they are written with.
Post a link when you get a correlation between dyes and manufacturers. 🙂