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RSS feedsIt's no great secret that you can generally save a bit of money by buying things online or by mail order, rather than buying from a high street shop. After all, old fashioned 'bricks and mortar' stores have to pay high rents and rates for their busy locations, as well as paying salaries for all those sales assistants.
Even so, we've been surprised by the vast differences we've seen recently in the cost of buying blank CD and DVD discs. These are generally known as 'optical' discs, as your computer's CD- or DVD-writer drive uses a laser mechanism to etch data onto the surface of the disc.
Most PCs and Macs these days include either a CD- or DVD-writer as a standard feature, so these types of blank discs have pretty much taken over from floppy disks as the most common form of removable storage.
You might, therefore, expect competition to drive prices down to some sort of generally agreed average level. In fact, there are enormous price differences on all types of optical discs and we discovered that high-street stores can still teach their online rivals a thing or two about competitive pricing.
Indeed, as you'll see, it's often not where you shop but what you shop for that matters. Moreover, reader input suggests that buying branded products could be a costly extravagance.
Firing blanks
The cheapest type of blank disc is the CD-R, which is essentially a form of disposable storage. You can use the disc until it's full, but you can't delete files from a CD-R and use it again.
Fortunately, they're so cheap that this isn't too much of a problem. The PC World store chain, for example, has its own-brand label, called PC Line, and you can buy a pack of 50 blank CD-R discs for £14.99. That works out at just 30p per disc, so they're all but disposable.
In the online world, some of the best deals come from Dabs.com, which has its own Dabs Value range of blank discs. Dabs is selling 25-disc packs of CD-Rs for £7.50 (also 30p per disc).
Remember, though, that with online stores you generally have to add postage to the basic price of any item. Dabs bases its postage charges on weight, which in this case adds an extra £1.76 to the price of the discs.
Other online stores such as Simply and Komplett have a fixed delivery charge of £5 per order, so in many cases you'll find it's actually cheaper to buy blank CD-R discs from PC World or some other high-street store. Dixons and PC World are part of the same group of companies, so Dixons also sells the PC Line range of discs. We also found some real bargains at good old Woolworths, such as a 20-disc pack of Philips CD-Rs that includes a nice CD wallet for £7.99.
The same is true when you look at more expensive, and reusable, CD-RW discs. The Dabs price of £8.00 for a pack of 10 Dabs Value CD-RW discs looks extremely reasonable when compared to £8.99 for a similar pack of discs from PC World's PC Line range. But when you add postage to the Dabs order you'll end up paying a total price of £9.76.
The problem for online dealers such as Dabs is that CD technology is well established, and blank CD prices are already so low that there's not very much room for further price cuts. By the time postage is added, these 'bargains' end up looking more expensive than their high-street rivals.
DVD digest
That picture changes a bit when you look at the cost of blank DVD discs, This technology is still relatively new, which means that prices are higher, so online dealers with lower running costs than high-street stores have got greater scope for price-cutting.
If you buy a Dabs Value pack of 25 DVD-Rs, for instance, it will cost £13.00 (52p per disc), with postage taking the total price to a still-reasonable £14.76. A similar pack of DVD-R discs from the PC Line range will cost a hefty £29.99 (£1.19 per disc), so buying online is still far cheaper, even taking postage into consideration.
However, all this assumes that you're prepared to buy low-cost, own-brand discs. The really big price hikes come when you start to look at established brand names.
Big-name brands
Both Dabs and PC World sell the Philips range of optical discs. At the time of writing, a 10-pack of Philips CD-R discs cost £9.99 from PC World (99.9p per disc) or £8.76 from Dabs (87.6p per disc, including postage). That's almost three times more expensive than either Dabs' or PC World's own-brand discs.
Other well-known manufacturers, such as Maxell, TDK and Verbatim are less expensive, but they still work out costlier than the Dabs Value and PC Line labels.
The price differences are even more glaring with DVD discs. PC World's own-brand DVD-R discs might have seemed pricey at £29.99 for a pack of 25 (£1.19 per disc), but if you want to buy some Hitachi discs from Dabs you'll end up paying nearly £36 (including postage) for a pack of just five discs. That works out at more than £7 per disc.
Hitachi does seem to be the worst offender, though. Other well-known companies, such as TDK, are more reasonably priced. Surprisingly, Woolworths comes up trumps once again, charging £17.99 for a 10-disc pack of TDK DVD-Rs.
In contrast, Komplett charges £20 (including postage) for a pack of just five TDK discs, proving once again that online stores aren't necessary more competitive than their high-street rivals.
The first thing that the firms behind these well-known brands will point out is that when you buy own-brand discs from Dabs or PC World, you are generally buying 'spindles' - packs in which discs are just lumped together without individual cases for the discs.
Most branded disc packs are supplied with individual jewel cases to protect them when you're travelling around or passing the discs on to friends or colleagues.
It can cost 50p to £1 to buy jewel cases individually, so this isn't a bad deal if you know you want the protection afforded by these plastic shrouds. Many of us, though, will happily do without them - especially if we've already got our own carrying cases for music CDs.
Dodgy discs?
The biggest argument for paying extra for these name-brand discs is that they are manufactured to higher standards and are therefore more reliable.
Certainly, we've heard no shortage of anecdotal evidence that buying unlabelled, no-name discs that come in packs of 100 or more for about £5 can be a bit risky: the Computeractive mailbag contains plenty of gripes about the reliability of some bulk-bought discs, suggesting that it's possible that you'll experience a higher failure rate when using such cheap products, thus driving up the overall cost.
However, firms such as Dabs and PC World can't exactly be dismissed as faceless companies, and their reputations would suffer if they were selling substandard discs. The own-brand discs sold by these companies are perfectly adequate for most home and small business users.
Philips, in particular, likes to promote the reliability of its discs. They may be expensive but the discs have been treated with an anti-scratch coating that helps to prevent them from getting damaged.
That will sound attractive if you're making a video disc to preserve your child's first steps for posterity, so you may be prepared to spend a little extra on high-quality discs that are intended to store important material.
Not all discs will be so important, though, so there's no reason why you can't use cheaper discs most of the time.
And even if you do prefer a well-known brand name, our advice is still the same - always shop around and compare prices before buying.
Our research shows that old-fashioned high-street stores can be just as competitive as online stores, even when it comes to well-known brand names. After all, who would have thought that we would end up recommending Woolworths as a place to buy hi-tech computer storage?
Dying discs
Using CD or DVD discs for long-term storage is a fairly safe bet. iMation, one of the leading disc manufacturers, quotes a lifetime of 30-50 years for its DVD discs, compared to about 10 years for VHS video tapes.
In fact, the biggest problem you're likely to experience with discs that are a few years old will be accidental damage, such as scratches, exposure to strong direct sunlight or condensation.
It is possible that really cheap or no-name discs may degrade more quickly than high-quality branded discs, but the main problem you're likely to have with poor-quality discs will occur during the initial recording process - you may find that your music, video or data files simply haven't been copied properly.
Indeed, the results of a Computeractive survey suggest that most of our readers are quite content with cheap, unbranded discs. Though well over half (61 per cent) of our readers had experienced some problems with bargain-basement discs, the vast majority (75 per cent) were sufficiently undaunted by the hiccups to continued buying the no-name offerings.
In other words, in the minds of most Computeractive readers the low cost of unbranded discs offsets or outweighs the potential problems. However, 16 per cent of our readers were so beset by problems that they said they would never again buy an unbranded CD-R or DVD-R.
Speeding fine
There's one little technical detail you need to watch out for when buying blank discs. The first CD- and DVD-writers ran at what's known as 1-speed (or 1x) - which meant discs rotated at the same rate as domestic CD or DVD players.
While this was fine for music and video playback, writing data at such a spin speed was slow. Modern drives run much faster - as much as 52x for CD drives and 12x for DVD drives.
Make sure, though, that any discs you buy are guaranteed to work at the same speed as your drive. The cheapest, lowest-quality discs may not work properly in the latest drives, so check the packaging of any discs that you buy to see what speed rating is listed. If in doubt - don't buy them.
See also:
Tape and film degrade each time you play them, but there is a way to convert your analogue memories into digital format. We show you how 24 Sep 2004
Tape and film degrade each time you play them, but there is a way to convert your analogue memories into digital format. We show you how 24 Sep 2004
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