8.1.7 Disc and Drive Compatibility

8.1.7.1  Compatibility between discs and drives may well be an issue when recording data on recordable and rewritable CDs and DVDs. Situations often occur where certain discs produced on a particular drive may produce very poor quality duplicates,or may be unreadable on other drives. Testing of this issue has revealed that this failure rate may be very high. An International Standards Organisation project – ISO N178 Electronic imaging – Classification and verification of information stored on optical media, may address the specific problem of drive compatibility.

8.1.7.2  The reason for poor performance may be related to a number of factors: Early drives do not have the laser power to calibrate on later types of discs; Drives designed for dye based discs cannot write, and often cannot read, rewritable discs; Software issues, aging parts, particularly lasers, and particular implementations may all produce inadequate results;The calibration information encoded into the polycarbonate substrate may not necessarily be precisely accurate. However, even taking these issues into account, a significant number of failures occur which are only explained as technical incompatibilities. The equipment manufacturers’ slightly varied implementation of the disc read standard and the variation in the discs quality mean that a situation can occur where discs and drives are incompatible to the extent that the particular combination may produce failed discs on a particular brand, or batch, of discs.

8.1.7.3  In order to ensure that drives and discs are compatible, it is recommended that a range of brands of reliable and reputable discs are recorded on the selected drive, and these discs are tested to determine error levels. This is discussed in the sections below.