LG-GSA22N - poor quality write to R03

[2Dogs]

I recently bought some Office Depot 16x +R discs - two 50 pack cake boxes for $6 apiece, not expecting too much in the way of media quality.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to see them identified as RICOHJPN R03.

My first burn was with my Samsung SH-S182M, at 16x. When I did a disc quality scan in CD-DVD Speed using my old BenQ 800, the results were pretty good. Although the PI errors were not as low as I would like to see, the graph was pretty even from start to finish with no great peaks or troughs. The disc was playable in all tested devices.



I then repeated the burn with my new LG GSA-H22N. I'd flashed TDB 1.01 firmware, and also taken the riplock off with MCSE.

When I ran the CD-DVD Speed check, the resultant scan looked horrible, and the disk was not fully playable.



So I'm thinking that at the very least, my LG has a problem with this particular media. Without trying out a bunch of different media and burn speeds, is there any way I can determine if my H22N is faulty? I'm reluctant to spend time and effort producing more coasters! Has anybody out there had good results with an H22N and this media? If it wasn't for the decent results when burning with the S182M, I would have assumed that the media was just crap.

[evilboy]

I know that BenQ burners have problems with scanning LG drives' burns (at least the x1xx series), often exaggerating error levels.
Could you do a scan of the LG burn with the Samsung at 8x?

[2Dogs]

Hi Oh evil one

I'd read about that BenQ scanning glitch myself somewhere, but like you said, it only seems to relate to the 1xx series, which use a different (generally thought to be better) chipset than the 2XX series.

I've found that the Samsung tends to show fairly similar scans for the PI errors, but generally lower values for the PI failures, and of course it doesn't show PO failures or jitter.

Here's the scan anyhow, and you can see that it's definitely not a good burn!



I see from the packaging that the Office Depot 16x discs are made in Taiwan, incidentally.

[evilboy]

I'd read about that BenQ scanning glitch myself somewhere, but like you said, it only seems to relate to the 1xx series, which use a different (generally thought to be better) chipset than the 2XX series.

The x1xx series uses the Renesas chipset, which (IMO) is inferior to the x2xx's Panasonic chipset because of the writing characteristics and the Z-CLV burning strategies for CD-R.

The Panasonic chipset doesn't have 16x P-CAV but a slightly slower 16x CAV strategy instead, but can burn DVD-R at 12x (which the Renesas drives cannot do, it's a known bug), and the Panasonic chipset burns CD-R with the superior CAV burning strategy.

The Samsung's scan is similar. This means that something's seriously wrong with the disc... Does a TRT show something special?

[2Dogs]

Hi evilboy, and thanks for your continued input!

Here's the TRT for the disc using the BenQ 800 (clone)
You can see that it runs into trouble where those quality scan problems increase



Running the TRT using the same disc in the LG shows a smooth curve. It's reading the disc pretty slowly - I presume that is caused by the 8x riplock with the write to +R media having been autoset to DVD-ROM booktype by the LG.



The fact remains that the disc will not play in my set top (standalone) DVD player - it will be recognised, but locks up near the end.

One other thing, and it might be a complete red herring. I bought the LG as an O.E.M. from Newegg. It was delivered by UPS, and was pretty well padded in styrofoam peanuts with the drive wrapped in bubble wrap. No damage to the carton. When I handle the drive, however, it feels like the whole internal mechanism is loose - when I flip it over, something big moves inside the case. I don't feel that with any of my other burners - but maybe it's an LG thing, with the mechanism suspended in some kind of damping arrangement. Don't suppose you or any other LG ownerrs can confirm a similar response from your LG?