Need Help: What type of DVD's do you recommend...

[canon23]

Hi All,

This sounds silly, but I've not burned any pictures on a DVD yet.  I've only save them on thumb drives and give them to friends I help take pictures for.  However, as I'm taking more photos for people, I have realized it's more practical to burn them into DVDs.  But since I've never done so, I'd like to ask everyone for suggestions on which DVDs to use?  Your help is much appreciated!

[dr croubie]

Just a quick answer with a question...
For the straight DVD -R, +R, -RW, +RW response, I don't think there's much difference these days, most drives and readers support everything.

But what do you want to use them for?
Playing in a DVD player to a TV? Sharing with friends straight to their PC? Or for achival/backup?

Playing in a DVD player to a TV, what you want is highly dependent on the player. If it's been made in the last few years, most formats and disc-types should be OK, just burn the files straight and the DVD player should navigate and find them. For aything older, you may have to go to PictureCD or other similar weird styles, or make a movie/slideshow, and hopefully someone else can help you on them. Maybe check with your friends as to what their players support first...
(and if they've got relatively new TVs, or even set-top boxes, a lot of them take USB drives too)

Sharing with friends on PCs? These days, it may be sad but true, that you're more likely to find a USB port than a DVD-drive on a computer. Uber-lightweight and small netbooks, iToys and the like, they all started ditching Optical drives a while ago.

Archiving? Don't even think about it. I've read (and i'm sure you can google your opinions too) that the dye in the recordable-layers on dvdrs doesn't last that long, maybe 5-years tops. Stick to USB drives and external hard discs for backups...

[M.ST]

I recommend Verbatim DVD+R 8.5GB DL 8x printable 25 DVD´s.

Panasonic BD-R DL 50GB 6x, 3 Bluray´s, printable (LM-BR50LWE3)

[Menace]

As said by dr C, do not use them for longer term storage - I lost a large amount of data in the past! I find writable CDRs to be more stable for data storage but they only have 700mb capacity.

Flash drives are probably the best solution IMHO and they are reusable.

Cheers

[M.ST]

No picture get lost until today using the Verbatim DVD´s.

But I recommend a professional SAN solution as a long time storage.

If you earn your money with photography there is no better solution than an SAN.

If you don´t have the money for a SAN, copy the pictures on a few harddiscs.

[AmbientLight]

Please be careful here. DVDs or Blueray disks are supposed to be short-term storage media only. DVDs may lose information based on being stored in the wrong place (e.g. near heating), sitting in the sun or such things. Using high quality DVDs as those recommended by M.ST will save you from the worst, but they are still DVDs.

If you are thinking about long term storage, then your best option is to store on several independent disk storage systems, such as simple USB-connected harddisks or using a SAN as recommended by Menace. You should use at least one copy, in case the disk or disk system still fails. With SAN and similar devices you must safeguard against a harddisk controller failure in the SAN, even though the SAN may already mirror internal disks to safeguard against disk failure, so you still have to have one copy outside of the SAN to be reasonably safe. Disk storage also has the advantage that you can quickly upgrade/update your storage system by just copying your files quickly from one to the other. With a good number of DVDs this is a rather ugly procedure.