Update: 5/18/2023
Its been over 14 years since I first posted in this topic, and slysoft is now redfox and migrated its old forum to this new one. I have stayed a loyal customer of anydvd and still use their products as well as elaborate bytes. They are still, in my opinion based on my own experiences, the better brand in its market.
Since my last post here I have continued to use Memorex media almost exclusively with the occasional use of verbatim. Still after all these years and all the countless backups I have made of my dvd and blu ray collections, I have yet to experience any, specifically brand, problems of any kind with Memorex media. I get the occasional bad disc, but no more than verbatim or any other media I have tried over the years. Also as I said in my past edit updates to this post in this topic, all of my backups on Memorex media that I made back when I first posted in this topic are still good and playing fine. Sure there have been the normal wear and tear that requires a new back up be made from time to time, but mostly those are rare. Also just to add, I have recorded, and played the memorex back ups I have made on a wide variety of different systems and stand alone hardware.
The overwhelming majority of my Memorex backups have held up very well over the years. In fact I have recently begun transferring my backups to hard drive as I am switching to exclusively digital copies in order to have easier access and portability for my collection. So I am in the process of transferring all of my collection including my oldest backups to digital storage and even backups I made 15 years ago are in remarkably great shape and still play without any issues. This project is going to take me quite some time to finish and I am only a fraction of the way through it, but I have nearly completed transferring all of my 10 to 15 year old backups which are the oldest and the first I ever did backed up on Memorex media.
Over all, I have to say that the rumors of Memorex being a typically bad brand of media are just as unfounded and subjective now as they were when I first proved webslinger and oldjoe wrong and called them both out on their misinformation. The problem was that webslinger, like oldjoe and so many others, was just repeating the same BS they were told. Webslinger, like so many others parroting his views, were not experts, and in most cases had not even experienced much if any of the issues they said were attributable to Memorex media. Even one of the top brands webslinger touted as being the best media brand ended up discontinuing production of their media. Their official reason was they were just offloading that responsibility to other manufacturers. The unofficial reason is that the cost of making their brand, coupled with the high price they charged for their media, just became too great to continue since other less expensive brands out sold them. One of those less expensive brands that outsold them was Memorex. Sure that other brand can still be purchased, but the manufacture process for them has been realigned to better compete with other less expensive brands. In other words, the process has been streamlined and made less exspensive and the manufacturers making them no longer gouge the customers by charging unrealistic prices.
Bottom line, Memorex is still a worthy, more cost friendly alternative to more popular brands. Verbatim is also very reliable in my opinion based on my own personal experiences using it. In closing let me just reiterate that anyone wishing to make an informed choice for the brand of media they use, do what I did and test them yourself. All too often people come to forums like this looking for brand recommendations for products they want to use. Quite often, people like webslinger or oldjoe, who do not really know what they are talking about and have no experience using or testing various brands of the product in question beyond their "favorite", will often tout their "favorite" as the preferred and better brand. They will even try to claim that science or professional testing backs up their points, but none of it is true and it's all part of the BS narrative they spin. They tend to spread BS and misinformation about other brands to bolster their views as well. Webslinger never went to the trouble to test Memorex as exhaustively as I did, nor did he know anyone professional or not, who tested them either. There was no "hard science" or repeated examples over 1000s of burners and platforms proving his claims either. In fact webslinger, oldjoe, and others who make similar claims, rarely ever used Memorex media and as such had no personal experiences with any of the issues they said were standard Memorex problems. As you can see as soon as I called out his claims in this topic and challenged his views, webslinger not only could not provide any personal experiences or any other kind of legitimate proof to back up his views, but he got irritated and threatened to ban me when he could not disprove my views. So let this topic stand as its own recommendation for you, to remind you, before you decide on any brand, to test them yourself. If you find a brand that works well for you whether its Memorex, verbatim, or any other brand, then stick with it. Do not rely on someone acting as a corporate shill, the way webslinger or oldjoe were, to tell you what is a better brand. More often than not those people are only recommending a product because they either are getting paid to promote it, or because they are mindlessly following the pack and do not know any better. Stay informed by your own personal experiences, that way if you choose to recommend a product brand, you, unlike webslinger or oldjoe, will actually know what you are talking about.
Added Note: What I find most amusing looking back on this 14 year old exchange, isn't just that I proved Webslinger, Oldjoe, and all of the other memorex haters wrong so effectively here. I did. What is even funnier is that 14 years later I am still proving them all wrong. I finally completed transferring all of my memorex movie copies over to hard drive storage as part of my media center project. I transferred a total of 1893 dvds( over 1500 were burned to memorex media) to hard drive back up storage. Most of those dvds are more than 10 years old. I specifically kept track of how many bad or corrupted discs I found during that whole process. Out of all of those dvds, only 23 memorex copies were bad. Out of those 23, 16 had scratches that were visible due to normal wear and tear. The other 7 had bad sectors preventing them from playing. All of those bad memorex dvds were close to 15 years old. Oddly enough, I had far more bad Verbatim copies that were done less than 5 years ago. The total Verbatim bad disc count was 30. That still leaves 1840 dvds, approximately 1477 Memorex copies, & 263 Verbaitm copies, that were still in excellent condition and playable with no issues at all. All of those copies were done on several different systems with several different recording hardware. That speaks volumes for how reliable and consistently decent media memorex dvds are. That is really the mic drop moment in this whole debate and puts the final nail in the coffin of Web, and Oldjoe's BS, baseless views about memorex. I replaced those 23 bad copies, and the 30 verbatim copies with new memorex copies, and have put all of my dvd backups into storage since I no longer need to play them since I have all of my movie collection on hard drives now.
So I am officially closing out this topic. I have completed my 14 year trial of memorex media and my results have been overwhelmingly in support of memorex media being reliable, long lasting, and cost effective. As I said never ever let anyone try and tell you what product you should trust and buy. Whether its dvd blank media or any other product. Test those products yourself, and make an informed decision. Web, and Oldjoe, and the other memorex haters here not only tried to BS me, but everyone else into not buying memorex. They were not giving anyone any factual information, they were only trying to push people into buying the brand of media that they were under contract to try and sell. You can find that out by further review of the earlier posts in this topic. They were invested in trash talking memorex because memorex was more cost effective as well as being very good quality and reliable which in turn threatened the sales of their preferred brand. I declare this debate over. Result: I won, they lost. So in closing......listen for the sound.........Yes that is the sound of me dropping the mic.