Scour wrote:This review is not online, only in a magazine. If you want the review really, i can scan the magazine and email it, but the language is german.
scour- I think you mean c't No. 7/2003. c't is
the German computer magazine, and I have great respect for it's tests.
I was somewhat perplexed by this one, though: LiteOn and Sony did not do well. In particular, the LiteOn LTR52246S, firmware 6S0C, was tested with Verbatim DLP 48x, burned @52x and the Sony CRX220E1, firmware 6YS1 with Traxdata 52x (Ritek). Both produced rather high BLER counts- average/peak 14/110 and 49/297 respectively. On the other hand, there are reports in this forum, e.g. Spazmogen, with much better results for the LiteOn combination, so I'm not sure what to make of this.
Further comparisons are a bit difficult because the media used varied from drive to drive. If possible the packaged media was used, otherwise Verbatim DLP 48x, TDK 48x, Traxdata 52x (Ritek) or Fuji 52x- whatever was accepted @52x.
A further LiteOn reseller is Traxdata: CDRW522452 plus, firmware 6SG1 with Traxdata 52x (Ritek) media. They did OK, although not tremendously great with their own media: 7/39. The best results in the test came from Cyberdrive CW099D, firmware 120M with Verbatim DLP 48x: BLER 1.3/20.
So from this test, LiteOn is
not the "most media friendly" drive. My personal experience with the LTR48246S is much more positive, though. See the media thread.
You may be right about the firmware update frequency, but I would certainly prefer frequent updates (even if they just fix things done "in a hurry") to non-existent ones, e.g. Artec.
G