What's even more annoying is buying a music CD and there is NO information on it at all. Which way is up? Who knows? Forget which band or artist it is...then you have to put away all the other CDs first to figure out which cover it belongs with.
Verbatim CDRs and DVD-Rs are rated highly - if they're made in JAPAN, because then they're really made by Taiyo Yuden who are generally considered top of the heap. If they're made in Taiwan, then they're not Taiyo Yuden, but probably CMC or ProDisc. Apparently the best ones of all are the Verbatim made in Singapore - but I've never seen any of those in my hunting.
Fuji and Maxell made in Japan are also Taiyo Yuden - made in Taiwan or elsewhere and they're probably Ritek. It is difficult to find ANYTHING made in Japan in brick and mortar stores - I've looked. You can, however, find them online - and yes, they will cost a bit more. The Taiyo Yuden CDRs and DVD-Rs can be found online however and are supposed to be second only to Mitsui in archival quality. Mitsui is pretty much impossible to find except online and they're at least twice the price of the Taiyo Yuden from my brief comparison. They also aren't sold by some of the biggest media dealers, like
http://www.rima.comThere are people who spend hours and hours discussing the merits of the various brands - it's really quite amazing. I went looking last week to try to decide what to buy in the way of DVD-Rs...
If you really want to get into it, try the forums at
http://club.cdfreaks.comAnd in the end, I got impatient and just got some Verbatims made in Taiwan from Best Buy! (the shipping costs on some of the online stores was sending the cost of the Taiyo Yuden disks through the roof - I could find good prices, but free shipping only came with purchases of $50 or more - and just how MANY DVD-Rs do I need?? 200 seemed a bit excessive!)