CyberHome: Don&#39;t Buy Their DVD+RW&#39;s <Rant>

A few weeks back, I purchased a Panasonic DMR-ES16 DVD Recorder. So far, I'm really pleased with it. The functionality is great and it's very easy to use, even for a beginner.

Of course, I needed discs to record on, so I bought a stack of 50 no-name DVD-R's for movies we edited in MovieMaker from our mini-DVD camcorder. I also bought a stack of 25 4.7GB 4x DVD+RW's, manufactured by CyberHome [more CamelCase].

So far, 2 of the 25 discs have failed to format. Even if none of the other discs fail, that's a fairly bad failure rate.

Naturally, I did not have the luxury of checking out CyberHome's reputation, as I bought the discs on impulse when I got my DVD Recorder. In hindsight, had I visited their website [or in this case, webshite] I would not have bought this brand anyway. Seeing a domain-parking page with their logo would not have inspired confidence in their brand. Perhaps they can't afford to maintain their webshite, after federal agencies seized more than 20,000 CyberHome-brand DVD recorders that allegedly used Philips patents without a license last year.