Man, I used every kind of blank media on a Plextor PR-820.
At first I tried to make a study of it and ordered many, many kinds of blanks from different actual-manufacturers. Some were more expensive, some were fairly cheap.
I left them in hot places with bright light. I left them in cold places with no light. I handled them roughly. They all worked fine, except for the ones that were damaged from handling.
I wound up with a preference for Kodak-branded media, because it had what I perceived to be a more durable protective coating on top and top-layer scratches seemed to be the worst killers of CD-Rs in my samples.
Later, once inkjet-printable discs became more common, I used those instead -- regardless of brand. The relatively thick, white coating was easy to write on legibly with a Sharpie and seemed to do a good-enough job of protecting the lacquer below it from being scratched.
Even with Pentium + Adaptec 2940UW + UW SCSI disks + Plextor SCSI + tons of RAM, just opening notepad.exe resulted in a buffer underflow... I practically held my breath while the damn thing was burning a CD !
