I've got an old Yamaha CDR-100 recorder here at work.

The thing is external SCSI, older than dirt, built like a tank, only 4x recording speed, but... most importantly... it's dead-reliable. I can burn disc after disc on this thing and it never makes a coaster. Every disc we make with this thing always works for everyone we send them to. To me, that's critical, and worth any amount of trouble that I have to go to in order to maintain that level of reliability.

This drive has a problem, though. It only likes to burn dark blue or dark green media made with cyanine. It won't reliably burn on media made with the lighter or transparent dyes. The "bad" discs for me are the ones that appear to be a very light shade of greenish-gold, instead of the more desirable dark blue or green.

The companies that manufacture the blank CD-R media have all been slowly adopting the light media instead of the dark media. One by one, each brand of blank disk has gone onto my "do not buy" list. A long time ago, I used to know which brands were good and which were not, but today I've got no clue what I'm gonna get when I open the package. Our supply of dark green Fuji discs just ran out, and when we got a replacement spindle of 100 Fuji discs, they were all the light stuff.

Does anyone know of any brand or supplier that can guarantee that I get the dark green cyanine media?

Googling hasn't been helpful... Lots of sites talk about the various dye types. There are even sites which try to list which manufacturers use which dye types, but when I look at those lists, they are hopelessly out of date. For instance, they may say a given brand is the "good" dye type, but I know from direct experience that the company changed dyes 15 months ago. And in any case, none of the sites I saw actually said they would sell me a media that was definitely the cyanine dye type.

Any ideas?