I know what the CDR FAQ says by identifying media by color, but he meant that saying a given color was "better" than another didn't make sense, which is true. He also says that it's true certain media won't work in certain burners or players, and that you need to test each brand of media in your particular player to know whether it'll work. Over the years I've done enough testing to know exactly what media works in this burner. What I've found is that once I'm using the right media, everything we make on this burner works on all players period. Unlike many newer IDE CDR drives, where you might make a disc that plays OK on your test machine, but send it to a customer and they get a read-error.

Those who accuse this burner of being unreliable just because it's picky about what kind of dye you feed it are missing the point. Once I feed it the right media, I'm confident that the discs I make can be sent to anyone, anywhere in the world, and it will work. I can't do that with just any burner. When I put the disc into that fedex envelope, I need to know it's not gonna come back. The only times we've ever had discs come back is when we use one of the other "newer" burners here in the office.

Your comment about 74-minute versus 80-minute media isn't applicable because the only difference between the two is how far out towards the edge of the disc the laser will go, it has nothing to do with the dye. And this is an older burner that won't even burn past the 74-minute boundary.