Blank Discs Not Created Equal
There was a time when burning a blank CD-ROM in your own home sparked feelings of wonder and joy as if you were performing a minor miracle. What once seemed like a technical marvel has, like so many small wonders, become routine. Now we can also burn our own DVDs. Sprinting down to the local mega-mart for a stack of blank CDs seems like a no-brainer, and it's quickly becoming so for DVDs. But the story doesn't actually end there.
Blank media still possess an air of mystery, at least to some people. When you buy a stack of shiny new platters packaged by Fujifilm, TDK Electronics, Ritek, Verbatim, Imation, Hewlett-Packard or another recognizable brand, you cannot count on the name that appears on the label to reveal the whole story. In fact, most of this blank media is manufactured by a short list of companies: India's Moser Baer, Japan's Ricoh and Taiyo Yuden, and Taiwan's CMC Magnetics, Prodisc Technology and Optodisc Technology.
