Gold FAQ

Question: Now that I've invested heavily in digital photography in both dollars and personal time, I'm trying to find the best available storage media to archive my digital images. After searching the web, I learned about your archive grade products, but most of the discussions concern music files, text and data storage, rather than image files. Does the high praise given your MAM-A gold CD-R products apply when storing JPEG, RAW, or Tiff files as well as music files, etc.?

Answer: Our MAM gold CD-R is generally respected as being the best archive grade recordable media available. It works equally as well for images in any photo format, music, text or data -- it's all just zeros and ones to the CD or computer. We are very involved in the photo market and our media is in use in 80% of the photo developing labs in Canada that offer our gold media as the "digital negative" for their customers' photos.

Question: I wish to scan both photographic prints and negatives on an Epson 4870 Pro Scanner and have the information burned onto CD's or DVD's in order to archive the images. Is there a Mitsui Gold DVD-R in addition to the Mitsui Gold CD-R to archive the images, and about how many images can be stored on each, with the best quality scanning?

Answer: MAM-A makes an Archive Grade Gold DVD-R with a capacity of 4.38 gb (same as standard DVD-R) For the scanner that you have, the max file size will be approx 160 MB (at 12,800 x 12,800 = max setting), so you should be able to store about 27 images of that size per DVD. Only about 4 images on CD at that resolution.

Question: I’ve heard that some jewel cases might shorten the archival life of a disc depending on the material that it is made of. Do you have any recommendations?

Answer: There are disc storage products that can be used to lengthen the archival life of CD and DVD media. By adding a Corrosion Intercept jewel case insert, you can significantly increase the lifetime of silver or aluminum discs (by some estimates, as much as 30 times). It is not necessary to use these types of products with the MAM-A Archive Grade CD-R or DVD-R media however, since pure gold is not susceptible to oxidation. MAM-A uses only 99.99% pure gold for its archive grade products.