Can we define "junk" for the purposes of this discussion? Is it junk because: (a) you make more coasters than you would believe is reasonable (b) you find a higher failure rate when trying to read them two years later than you think is reasonable (c) you don't believe that it will last the twenty years (or whatever they claim) ? Given a CD-R (blank or already written), what tool(s) do you use to determine the characteristics on which you are judging it and what are "good" and "bad" things to look out for? Personally, I have only had one read-failure in several hundred burns. That's not counting a few coasters along the way - this was a partial read-failure some six months to a year later when I came to use the CD. I have no idea whether the data was ever written correctly (since EasyCD Creator - which came with the drive - does not seem to have a read-after-write check). Since then I have performed a comparison-against-source step after burning any CD. Fingers crossed, no further failures so far. Antonio