Lite-On ATAPI iHBS212 2 HL05, 3.08 GB burned at 4x speed
sold as "Emgeton 4x DVD+R Digireel Oxygen Surface"
MID: Beall000 P40 (000)
manufactured in South Korea by BeAll Developers, Inc.
This is now an extremely rare medium from a small South Korean manufacturer, BeAll Developers, Inc. Under the Emgeton brand, we saw everything from B-grade media with Sony MID from the Taiwanese manufacturer Lead Data, which was of fairly decent quality, to almost unusable RW media from Infodisc, to top-of-the-line Japanese Taiyo Yuden on one end of the spectrum and disastrous Plasmons from an unknown manufacturer on the other. Occasionally, there were also rarities in the form of discs from Malaysian Fornex or this South Korean specialty.
BeAll Developers, Inc. was linked to Samsung Electronics from the beginning, including ownership, as this company was the largest investor. The company also collaborated with Japan's Pioneer (supplier of one of the lines and probably a laser beam recorder for the production of stampers), Germany's Steag Hamatech (production line), and Taiwanese manufacturer Ritek (the purpose of which is unclear; perhaps they purchased dye from them). The company had only a few lines and very quickly reached the limits of profitability, which prevented it from expanding and probably led to its bankruptcy in early 2006. It is therefore quite a miracle that some of its media occasionally made it to us, mostly in the form of these Emgetons.
In the end, BeAll became famous for the only medium of its kind in the world - a DVDR with a capacity of 4.85 GB, which was achieved in a similar way to oversized CD-Rs by stretching and narrowing the groove to the maximum possible. Unfortunately, I never got my hands on such a medium, as compatibility must have been very problematic. It is shocking that even 20 years after its collapse, BeAll still has a functioning website. Perhaps the hosting company forgot about it, or it is running on some Samsung servers and no one cares.
In the beginning, Emgeton labeled its DVDR media with the bizarre marketing term "Digireel Oxygen Surface," which is nonsense on principle, as how can you have an "oxygen surface" or "layer" on a medium, and they labeled all their media that way regardless of the manufacturer. But it sounded cool.
I didn't burn the media to the end; I only got a single sample with scratches on the outer circumference, so I didn't burn the entire 4.7 GB. The quality is great considering that the media had been sitting in a Slovak village electronics store for more than 21 years and that this MID code is really obscure and a relatively new Blu-ray burner could easily have failed to handle it, which did not happen.
