I don't know a lot about CD-R quality, but I was told that one good indicator of the quality of a CD-R is whether or not you can see through them (i.e.: amount of translucence); I went and bought a spindle of these over lunchtime, and these are INDEED translucent, when held up to a light. They have a silver top side with a little black lettering, and a slightly greenish-goldish tint on the bottom side.
I burned an ISO of Red Hat 6.2 at 8X with no problems on one of them, just to test it out, but I'm a little hesitant to burn anything that I actually intend to keep for a long time--I'm not really confident with the quality of these disks.
They may burn just fine, and for the price, a few coasters won't hurt anything, but when it comes to making backups of my favorite software or music CD's, I think I'll stick to a little better quality, like the TDK or Memorex disks I've used before.