CDRLabs DVD Writer Poll - May

by **Ian** on Tue May 02, 2006 11:52 am

Vote for your favorate DVD writer. By doing so, you'll hopefully help those looking to buy a new drive. Once again, I tried to chose original drive designs that are currently available or will be soon.

Feel free to leave comments and an explanation as to why you voted the way you did. Also, if there's a drive you'd like to see added to the poll, let me know.

For reference, here's the top 5 drives from April's poll:
1. BenQ DW1650/1655
2. BenQ DW1640
3. Plextor PX-716A
4. LG GSA-4167B
5. NEC ND-4550A/4551A

by **Ian** on Tue May 02, 2006 11:53 am

The BenQ DW1640 and Plextor PX-716A just won't go away. Are people just not buying new drives?

by **dolphinius_rex** on Tue May 02, 2006 12:17 pm

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The BenQ DW1640 is the best drive on the market, even if it's no longer SOLD on the market under BenQ's name, and is out of production. There is no more satisfying drive out there overall... although there ARE better drives for recording CD-Rs and CD/DVD RW, but for all around Single Layer performance, it's simply the best there is (and just had a new firmware released yesterday too!

)

by **Justin42** on Tue May 02, 2006 2:24 pm

I think the DVD burner market is really starting to stagnate. They're no longer the "new, cool" tech, speeds haven't increased in over a year (I don't count 18X since it seems to create horrible discs), LightScribe/LabelFish (erm, flash) haven't excited too many people due to price of media...

There's no really compelling reason to upgrade if you have a 1640/4167/716 (or even a generation or two older)...

by **dodecahedron** on Tue May 02, 2006 2:41 pm

i'll upgrade when i can get a good drive (good burn quality on 16x media) that does 12x DVD-RAM. or even better: 16x DVD-RAM.

by **vinnie97** on Wed May 03, 2006 3:08 am

I'm as happy as punch with my 3500AG...

by **Predjo** on Thu May 04, 2006 10:38 pm

I agree 3500 is the best, i have 3550@4551 and plaxtor 740-benq 1640 but i think that 3500 work better.

by **Scour** on Fri May 05, 2006 6:23 pm

I voted for the LG H10A. Looks very good with many media and it´s a very fast writer

by **MediumRare** on Fri May 19, 2006 4:31 pm

I voted for the LiteOn 165P6S. I now own one and it's the DVD-burner I've ever had. :wink:

OK, that's not hard- my previous drive was a SOHW-1213S@1653S, which was not the world's best burner (OK @8x).

But what I really like about this drive is the added value as a technical toy. Some of the LiteOn developers (Karr, Wind and now "Tom") are putting out test firmware and tools with new capabilities for the 5S and 6S drives: Hypertuning and overspeeding capabilities, an experimental "Online Hyper Tuning" similar to BenQ's WOPC. The test firmwares also support 16x reading for all DVD+-R, not just those with a 16x burning strategy like the official firmware to date.

And the icing on the cake is a new toy: DVD Scan Beta .01 that does jitter, FE/TE and beta scans for the 5S and 6s drives with the test firmware. It's definitely a beta- the user interface is full of warts and you have to disable all other optical drives in the device manager to get it to work, but it's available and there are lots of things to try.

What more do you want from a drive? Just about every burner now does well @8x these days (and that's really fast enough) so we look at other distinguisching features. 18x ? Fuddle Duddle. Lots of tweaks and tests is where the fun is!

See this thread at CDFreaks about DVD-Scan. The official download link doesn't seem to work: try the one in this post.

Attached is my first jitter scan (an ancient test disc from my first burner).

G

by **dodecahedron** on Fri May 19, 2006 4:43 pm

Lite-On making a come-back? overtaking BenQ?

by **MediumRare** on Fri May 19, 2006 4:49 pm

dodecahedron wrote:Lite-On making a come-back? overtaking BenQ?

Sure, why not? they're taking over BenQ's OD division. :wink:

Incidentally, I just noticed that I inadvertantly voted for the 160P6S and not the 165P6S.

G

by **dolphinius_rex** on Fri May 19, 2006 7:44 pm

this isn't the first time jitter/beta testing was attempted with LiteON drives... in the past it was found to not work very well. Hopefully LiteON has solved some of the problems (or should I blame Mediatek?).

by **Ian** on Fri May 19, 2006 8:19 pm

Hopefully this will make it into the suite of utilities Lite-On is rumored to be working on. Now that they're working with BenQ, it wouldn't surprise me if they actually included them with their drives and advertised it as a feature.

by **Ian** on Wed May 31, 2006 11:36 pm

Last day to vote. Are you Pioneer and NEC fans going to let the BenQ drives win again?

by **dolphinius_rex** on Thu Jun 01, 2006 2:46 am

Ian wrote:Last day to vote. Are you Pioneer and NEC fans going to let the BenQ drives win again?

Yes... yes they will :wink:

by **LoneWolf** on Thu Jun 01, 2006 2:13 pm

I recently had a chance to possibly replace my 3500AG with a 3550A (fixing a machine for someone else, it needed a new DVD writer). I thought about it for awhile, and then didn't. My 3500 has worked well for the time I've owned it, DVD burns are great (for CD burns, I still miss my Yamaha CRW-F1, though the NEC isn't bad) I think I've burned maybe one bad disc since I got it. I care more about burn quality than speed (I write most of my media at 8X still, 4X if it's really important to me), so until I do more +RW/-RW writing, I don't see myself needing a new drive.

by **Jim** on Thu Jun 01, 2006 3:42 pm

With the price cut of the retail DVR-111D at Best Buy and the Buffalo firmware enabling Labelflash and single layer DVD+R bitsetting, perhaps the Pioneer will get a few more votes. It got real decent reviews at cdfreaks.

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