Thanks Dee-27.
Not to take anything away from your and Jan70's great work, but it would be nice to have a comparison against white printable discs also.

BTW, I often wonder why people even care about "half an hour" LightScribe crap, or almost "non existing" LabelFlash, when a simple printer can achieve photo quality prints on CD/DVD's in 5mins.

That is a good idea, i will try and find some time this weekend to print on a normal printable disc and post the result here.

The only problem is, the scan provided in the review could not pick up how good the Glossy finish on the Verbatim media looked. You would have to see it with your own eyes to see how spectacular it looks.

Maybe you could try doing a macro shot with a digita camera instead?

I'm not sure it's really fair to compare different printable media types unless you have assured some sort of appropriate adjustments of the printer driver. Printer drivers do not always properly adapt to different surfaces, so you may only be demonstrating that that particular printer favors one type surface over another.

I find that with careful adjustments, I can get virtually identical results with all types of disc surfaces. True, gloss finish oftens looks better to some eyes, but color and contrast are very adjustable with most drivers.

So, ignoring the "gloss vs flat finish" questions, if these discs look different than those, it's only because of the printer adjustments.

Could gloss paper also absord the ink better resulting in better contrast?

The discussion of which photo prints look better and why will probably never end (it has been going on for years in paper printing), but I can only confirm that when printing on true glossy photo quality dvd media, the results look spectacular.
I tried every possible combination of driver settings and more or less protection spray on Verbatim and TY type full face white printables (even including a disc that I printed twice with my Epson R200, giving it a 'rich' image quality), but the glossy prints just look different and can produce results that you would never reach with non-glossy surfaces.

Do these DVDs suffer bleeding from moisture? Anyone have a solution for that problem?

SVP now stoch these 'Verbatim Glossy Printable (16x) DVD-R' at £9.99 for 25
http://svp.co.uk/products-solo.php?pid=1041

The discs are not waterproof so you would still have to be careful in that regard. Only thing that can stop that using an inkjet printer is to coat the discs in some sort of protective coating, eg a spray lacquer like Pressit Sprayfix in europe or Krylon in usa.

Have done a little review of my own at http://www.disc-info.com/content/view/173/29/

Basically same conclusions as Dee and Jan's one.

Really nice review.

Finally, printable discs that will look as good as the shiny originals that have that silk screen finish.

Btw, printing a disc with a Canon Pixma 5000 on high quality takes about 1 minute or less.

Anyone heard about a replacement for the Epson R800? It's been on the market since 2003. I wish Epson would upgrade this model to a printer that uses the new K3 UltraChrome ink. Epson doesn't offer a printer with this ink and CD/DVD printability.

Anyone know where to get theses in the US?

In a few days I should be receiving my shipment of these Verbatim DVD-Rs!

I ordered them from www.blankmedia.ca last week. 20 pack of Verbatim Glossy DVD-Rs in slim jewel cases.

I also asked the blankmedia people if they could get a hold of the Verbatim Glossy DVD+Rs that hopefully will be available.

I will be using the Epson R200 to print.

How do they compare to old widescreen printable Verbatims? I have Canon IP5000 as well.
The review is lacking comparison to the old printable surface.

Microcenter carries them instore. They're probably the only retailer in the States to do so.

The print quality is quite good - I love glossy printables!

With my Plextor 716UF, I'm getting an average PIE of 6 when burning at 8x. I'm having trouble duplicating the results from the review article. How on earth do you gets get a PIE avg of 1.0 or less?

Burning at 4x gets me a PIE avg of 4. What am I doing wrong?

Anyways, to sum up, these are pretty good - not as good as the Verbatim 16x DVD+Rs I have - MCC 004, PIE avg of 1.2, SKU 94971. But far far better than TDK DVD+R glossies (PIE avg of 40) and the horrid Ritek G05s (PIE avg in the 100 area, AND they degrade and fail verify).

BTW, I am using Plextools XL Pro version 3.09. The TA test (media quality test) says excellent in the inner, middle, and outer areas of the disc - rating of 5/5 in each. Much better than the Verbatim printable MCC004s I have (matte surface).

The only thing you are doing wrong is that you're comparing averages calculated in a completely different way.

The PIE averages in the article (KProbe scans) are calculated as the total amount of PIE divided by the amount of PIE blocks on the disc (approx. 140.000 PIE blocks), so anything lower than 140.000 PIE will result in an average PIE below 1.

PlexTools used to perform average calculation in the same way, but in recent versions (don't know exactly when this happened) the average calculation is based on the highest PIE seen in the number of ECC blocks that is shown as one vertical line in the graph, and then averaged over the graph.

Since each vertical line in the graph represents the maximum PIE per 8 ECC blocks measured over hundreds of ECC blocks, this alternative way of calculating averages gives much higher averages!

So if you have an average of 6 PIE in a PlexTools Sum8 or Burst scan, there is nothing to worry about!

Hey, thanks for the reassurance! It's been driving me nuts, because I saw such a low PIE average for the MCC04s I have.

There are lots of spikes in the graph, but then again I just upgraded from Plextools 3.05 to 3.09 before I tried these discs.

Strangely, last night I was able to get Plextools to give me an average of 1.00 PIE - and I have no idea why that is so! The PI/PO scan went very very slowly - so I'm guessing that the 2x CLV DVD read setting actually started to kick in. But this morning I cannot duplicate this even after rebooting and power cycling the drive. I've tried the USB and the Firewire interface on the 716UF. Perhaps this is a bug in Plextools - according to the documentation it is supposed to slow the drive down for the scans. I even went into the drive's Basic Settings and forced the DVD Read Speed setting to 2x CLV.

I'm having trouble getting KProbe 2.5.2 to work - I guess it only works on Lite-On drives (after reading the docs!). Damn.

I also found another problem with my system - for some reason, burns cannot sustain a write rate of 12x - I get massive buffer underruns when the burn reaches the 2/3rds mark, so now I'm stuck with burning at 8x.

It didn't used to be this way - I was able to burn at 12x no problem before. Ah well. The 8x burn quality seems ok.

Some observations on the print surface:

Drying seems to take a long time - however, it has been raining steadily out here in the prairies the last 16 hours. Relative humidity in the house is around 45% now.

My prints were done at around 8 PM last night, and it has been more than 12 hours. I touched the surface of one of my discs and it still feels wet to the touch. It doesn't help that I put the disc back in the slim jewel case.

These discs do not seem to be waterproof - I lightly wet my finger and touched the surface, and ink came right off. I guess that is expected - there is no claim of water proofing on the packaging. This is not a Primera Tuffcoat with Aquaguard, that's for sure (no, I don't have any Tuffcoat discs - but I did see a review!).

I'll check the surface again in another 12 hours.

I used an Epson R200. One disc I used Best Photo - which leaves nasty bands on dark areas, and another disc I used Photo RPM with Super Microweave. The latter feels a little bit more wet after 12 hours than the first disc. Next time, I will just use Photo RPM without Super Microweave.

I will probably have to continue spraying these discs with the Krylon UV Glossy Spray I have - we'll know in a day or two.