Concerning Autostrategy: Not worth testing! Why would anyone want to waste some Vampire discs to burn more Vampire discs which lose their data after 3 months instead of being destroyed by the writer right away?? Plextor should have fixed 16x writing instead of doing such hacks
However, scanning one disc at 2x speed takes about 1 hour, so you could scan like 100 discs in a week :p If PlexTools were allowing to do PIE/PIF scans in a row, without user interaction, you could at least go shopping while DL media scans are running. I really wonder if i'm the only one wanting to do both scans without having to launch and screenshot them separately. But well, Bushound was the key to the solution
Generally, the results in the review are, well, different from a lot of user's experience. Is it possible that someone at Plextor picked a drive that actually worked, to send it as review drive?
Concerning the number of 16x discs supported, there is nothing wrong with that. You are long enough in that business to know that there is more crap media out there than working media, and that you cannot blame the drive for what media manufacturers like ritek and cmc are doing (like inconsistency). The only thing you can blame a drive for is
a) error rate. It has to limit the write speed if necessary
b) not working on a disc type several other drives work on. Then, the media can't be too bad
E.g. a writer killing Ritek DL discs can be blamed for even trying to write on them, but not for "not ejecting a recorded and working disc". In this case, the plextor 716 actually did a small miracle.
