[charlie_ps2]

Don't Riteks have a purple dye?

The dye is due to the material of the photo-sensitive layer and the purple tinge doesn't give the laser any problems. Indeed the dye is the key to everything in so far as it has to react to the narrow focus laser beam within the time it fires. There will be a gold or silver reflective layer behind that - usually silver on DVD-R.

When the laser reads the disk, at lower power than when it burns it, the opaque bits are those burned by the laser and they are sufficiently opaque on any colour DVD-R dye to block reflectivity unless the burner did a bad job, in which case it would have generated an error on burning with the read-after write check.

So it's just as likely to be a ****ty Magic 3 doing its naughty trick as it would be ****ty media. But the dye colour won't be the problem - just the chemistry of the dye on that brand.