CD burning quality: Plextor Premium vs Liteon 52327S

[rdgrimes]

I'm just trying to say that scans done on the drive are completely useless to anyone not using the same drive,

D. Rex, this was my point, and it applies equally to ALL drives, including (and especially the Plex.) the 48125 and Plex drives.
None of them should be compared to others.

[dolphinius_rex]

regrimes: I don't quite agree in this case, since the LiteON 48125W and the Plextor Premium both come very close to emulating the AudioDev calibrated equipment. Of course the scans on these drives will not tell you how the discs will perform on other drives, but it will tell you how they perform against the standards set for CD-Rs... which is more then you can say for other drives.

Regarding the LiteON burner, showing less errors then other drives show could mean two things, either it can correct the "missing" errors, or it is just skipping over them...

[rdgrimes]

either it can correct the "missing" errors, or it is just skipping over them...

Sighs,
The errors do not exist on the disc, and there are no "missing errors".

[hoxlund]

from owning both high speed drives from both companies, Lite-On vs. Plextor

i PREFER Plextor, period, PREFER

[CDRecorder]

from owning both high speed drives from both companies, Lite-On vs. Plextor

i PREFER Plextor, period, PREFER

Just out of curiosity, why do you prefer Plextor?

[RJW]

better built

This is not in question, nor on topic. most sensible folks would conclude that to justify the price, the Plex would need to last 2-3x as long as the LiteOn. that would mean it should be capable of running somewhere between 5000 and 10000 discs. I wonder how many end-users would care to run that many discs on a drive. not to mention it would be sorely outdated long befor it wore out!

To me this and quite some people in my area this means the plextor should burn arround 250 disc's.
My Lite ON 48246S broke down after arround 80 disc's.
My PHilips 3610 which is really a bad quality construction even reached above triple times good burnt disc's as the Lite On befor it died.
My Plextor 24/10/40 is still going strong after allmost 2 years.(And yes it burned more

Now people will say I was un lucky. Well 2 local stores have dropped Lite On because of 2 many drives returning. So this says enough.
From one store I heard they are selling mostly Plextor drives and have the lowest amount of returned drives with Plextor and Yamaha as brand.
Now this could be because of Plextor own RMA service.(Just call and pick up or swap directly) That they don't see much returns. Still Lite On has one of the highest returning rates as a brand according to the same people.

What people are paying for when you buy a Plextor premium instead of Lite On is support !! So if you prefer support and quality controle then buy Plextor.

And I must say I haven't hold the premium in my bare hands yet but the Plextor 24/10/40A I have feels way better constructed as the LIte On or the Philips 3610.

For all the others who don't care about service or do not want to pay the extra for service pick-up Lite On. However if it gets screwed then don't blame Lite On for the long waiting times or poor support since that's what you payed for.

Now about burn quality are we takeing into account other parameters.
The 7s and the 401S have proven to give lower error rates as Plextor at full speed with good media. However how are effects as jittter/beta ?
With lower speeds my experience is that Plextor drives seem to be a head the 6s/7s series. With cheap media Plextor is way ahead the 6s/7s series the 401S however is prety close.
However 401S does seem to be close with measurements with good media. With more worse media it seems to report less. It might be a better reader or it might be the way how it counts errors.
Only one weird thing it sometimes shows spikes for C2 which are not there allways or on other measurement tools. Is this a drive error or does the drive really reads them at that time ?

Considering they have a DVD Test Forum at CD Freaks (with most scans done in KProbe, with all types of drives) it must be at least partially accurate.

This argument is a allways used very often and is a very incorrect one.
If something is used much it doesn't mean it's reliable.
Also accuracy can not be measured for cd analyzing !

[CDRecorder]

To me this and quite some people in my area this means the plextor should burn arround 25 disc's.
My Lite ON 48246S broke down after arround 80 disc's. ... Now people will say I was un lucky. Well 2 local stores have dropped Lite On because of 2 many drives returning. So this says enough.

That's really unusual that your 48246S died so quickly; Lite-On drives routinely last for thousands of burns. If even a few percent failed as frequently as yours did, people would figure this out and quit buying them. Also, companies such as Gateway and Dell are using Lite-On drives in their computers, and I highly doubt they would do so if the drives failed often.

[fluxus_LT]

either it can correct the "missing" errors, or it is just skipping over them...

Sighs,
The errors do not exist on the disc, and there are no "missing errors".

rdgrimes, you shouldn't be so sure. it may be right that liteon is just skipping or ignoring errors and krprobe shows it. How could you explain that fact, that according to reviews plex's qcheck did find C2 errors which shouldn't exist, while WSES didn't. so may be qcheck raises higher standarts in cheking media ?

on the whole, I dont know if it is important to find out which drive do less errors. because that doesn't make any difference for many users. They only want that the drive could burn data well and could read it.
And they dont care about c1/c2 or any other errors.

Well , I think I began a useless flame about that quality.

[hoxlund]

i don't know but to me the drive lookds and feels like it will last longer, the way the tray comes out, its not as flimsy

all the extra features, securec, gigarec, powerec

[aviationwiz]

To me this and quite some people in my area this means the plextor should burn arround 25 disc's.
My Lite ON 48246S broke down after arround 80 disc's. ... Now people will say I was un lucky. Well 2 local stores have dropped Lite On because of 2 many drives returning. So this says enough.

Also, companies such as Gateway and Dell are using Lite-On drives in their computers, and I highly doubt they would do so if the drives failed often.

Not true at all, companies just buy whatever is the cheapest for them. If it fails a lot, so be it. Companies also tend to use cheapest (generally worse quality parts) in thier systems. Example: Dell Motherboards suck, HP's are (at least my last 600MHZ system) a pain to upgrade. Why do they do this? It saves them money, meaning larger profits for them.

[CDRecorder]

Not true at all, companies just buy whatever is the cheapest for them. If it fails a lot, so be it. Companies also tend to use cheapest (generally worse quality parts) in thier systems. Example: Dell Motherboards suck, HP's are (at least my last 600MHZ system) a pain to upgrade. Why do they do this? It saves them money, meaning larger profits for them.

Aviationwiz: That's very true; they do buy things cheaply to save money. However, if they saw a high failure rate, they would be losing more money than they would buying a slightly better drive, so they probably try to buy drives that will last for a while, even if they aren't the very best.

Also, you mention that Dell's motherboards aren't good, and that HP computers are hard to upgrade. That's very true, but that doesn't cause higher failure rates of the system; it's just annoying to the customer. Because those things don't cause them to have to repair the computers more frequently, they don't lose much (if any) money because of poor motherboard or case design.

[hoxlund]

and thus people steer away from them, just ask me, i work retail

its very hard to sell HP, Compaq, cause they have had and do have a reputation of being cheap and not upgradeable

[motocoke]

To me this and quite some people in my area this means the plextor should burn arround 25 disc's.
My Lite ON 48246S broke down after arround 80 disc's. ... Now people will say I was un lucky. Well 2 local stores have dropped Lite On because of 2 many drives returning. So this says enough.

That's really unusual that your 48246S died so quickly; Lite-On drives routinely last for thousands of burns. If even a few percent failed as frequently as yours did, people would figure this out and quit buying them. Also, companies such as Gateway and Dell are using Lite-On drives in their computers, and I highly doubt they would do so if the drives failed often.

Have you tried backing up over 66 CDs at a go ?

Well I have and the Lite-On could not proceed after the 30th. It just hanged. It was okay the next time I used it the following day.

Tried the same on a Plextor Premium, no problem.

I have both a Lite-On and Premium. The Premium is better built.

[CDRecorder]

Have you tried backing up over 66 CDs at a go ?

Well I have and the Lite-On could not proceed after the 30th. It just hanged. It was okay the next time I used it the following day.

Tried the same on a Plextor Premium, no problem.

I have both a Lite-On and Premium. The Premium is better built.

Well, I must admit that I've never burned that many CDs at one time in my recent Lite-Ons. One time, I allowed someone to use my old Lite-On LTR-12101B to burn 100 CD-Rs (not a while lot of data per CD) in a row, and the drive had no problems burning up until the very last disc without stopping. It probably could have burned far more.

Edit: What Lite-On drive do you have, and did the drive or the discs seem hot when it quit burning?

[rdgrimes]

plex's qcheck did find C2 errors which shouldn't exist

There's an enournous lack of understanding about what these errors are and how they are reported. They do not exist on the disk, they are the result of a drive being unable to get a correct data stream from the reading of the disk. It's well known that different drives report different things as being "C2" and "C1". It's also completely normal for different drives to produce different error scans on the same disc. If this were not the case, we would have no need for error checking tools.
The ONLY purpose for tools like Kprobe is to compare different burns on the same drive.

[fluxus_LT]

plex's qcheck did find C2 errors which shouldn't exist

There's an enournous lack of understanding about what these errors are and how they are reported. They do not exist on the disk, they are the result of a drive being unable to get a correct data stream from the reading of the disk. It's well known that different drives report different things as being "C2" and "C1". It's also completely normal for different drives to produce different error scans on the same disc. If this were not the case, we would have no need for error checking tools.
The ONLY purpose for tools like Kprobe is to compare different burns on the same drive.

Ok, so why blame Plextor ? If you burn cd on plex, and do the kprobe scan on liteon it is absolutelly clear that liteon will produce different result from that when disc was burned on liteon.

In fact I dont understand exactly what do those scans show ? that plextor or any other drive is not able to read cd as liteon do ?
You mentioned that errors are not on disc. So, there is no fault in drive's burning quality - only in reading.

In conclusion, why blame plextor's burning quality if liteon is not able to read correctly plex's cd ? of course, it does the reading better when reads cd burned on it's own...

[fluxus_LT]

What I noticed only now, is that Ian did a review about Plextor Premium and checked the quality only iwth Q-check.

I now have seen that the Plex PX-W5224TA quality testing is done with Kprobe and the results are amazing - very low error rates ( I doubt with the opinion of rdgrimes and other liteon users about that plex do higher error rates). Look

http://www.cdrlabs.com/reviews/index.ph ... erformance

[dolphinius_rex]

To me this and quite some people in my area this means the plextor should burn arround 25 disc's.
My Lite ON 48246S broke down after arround 80 disc's. ... Now people will say I was un lucky. Well 2 local stores have dropped Lite On because of 2 many drives returning. So this says enough.

That's really unusual that your 48246S died so quickly; Lite-On drives routinely last for thousands of burns. If even a few percent failed as frequently as yours did, people would figure this out and quit buying them. Also, companies such as Gateway and Dell are using Lite-On drives in their computers, and I highly doubt they would do so if the drives failed often.

Have you tried backing up over 66 CDs at a go ?

Well I have and the Lite-On could not proceed after the 30th. It just hanged. It was okay the next time I used it the following day.

Tried the same on a Plextor Premium, no problem.

I have both a Lite-On and Premium. The Premium is better built.

I have burned well over 200 CD-Rs straight on the LiteON 40125S (per drive, on three seperate drives) and it work VERY well. And where I work now, we have a couple of CD Duplicator towers that all use the LiteON 52327S drive, and they have been known to burn much larger amounts then that even! (with no problems)

[rdgrimes]

So, there is no fault in drive's burning quality

No this is not correct either. Here are the main variables in determining how a error scan turns out:

1) the burn drive
2) the media itself
3) the burn speed
4) the reading drive
5) the reading speed

Change any one of those variables and you can see very different scan results. And the scan results do not necessarily tell you anything about the relative quality of any one of those same variables.

[RJW]

To me this and quite some people in my area this means the plextor should burn arround 250 disc's.
My Lite ON 48246S broke down after arround 80 disc's. ... Now people will say I was un lucky. Well 2 local stores have dropped Lite On because of 2 many drives returning. So this says enough.

That's really unusual that your 48246S died so quickly; Lite-On drives routinely last for thousands of burns. If even a few percent failed as frequently as yours did, people would figure this out and quit buying them. Also, companies such as Gateway and Dell are using Lite-On drives in their computers, and I highly doubt they would do so if the drives failed often.

Not so unusual if you hear what 2 of my local stores say about them.
One store owner has a also a duplicator which contained 5 52327S Lite On's. The first 2 died in the first month. He replaced them and one of the replacements died in the next 3 months. Now the drives are still working. However 3 out 8 is much to high ! Now he said that hey had at overall procental return rate of Lite On drives is arround 15%. This is above the average they normal have arround 5% returned opticaldrives .
And with Lite On they had a overall fail out experience. Not that it was with just one batch of one model like the first batch of SONY DRU500.

Have you tried backing up over 66 CDs at a go ?

No that's not the case.
Also more people in my area seem to have there writers dying befor 400 burns.(bought at different stores and in different places.). And I think the drive should really last longer as 400 burns since even my Philips 3610 did.

So for that reason I can no longer recommend Lite On for the die hard users. I would recommend in the same price level LG these days which might not have funky tools as K-probe and might be burning disc's a bit worse, they do last longer.

[dolphinius_rex]

The only bad experiences I've ever had with LiteON was with a creative OEM 12x LiteON burner that just wouldn't work. We returned it I think 3 times before we got one that worked.... of course its' lasted something like 5 years afterwards now, so we are quite satisfied. We should have known better then to buy a Creative CD burner! I've heard only bad things about any of their OEM drives, both CD-ROM and CD-RW, and not just the LiteON made ones. But that was before I really knew anything about optical drives and media too.

[RJW]

Hmm the plextor creatives are cool. But still reflash the firmware to Plextor. (The good point was that the creative OEM was cheaper !)

[wicked1]

[/quote]
Have you tried backing up over 66 CDs at a go ?

Well I have and the Lite-On could not proceed after the 30th. It just hanged. It was okay the next time I used it the following day.

Tried the same on a Plextor Premium, no problem.

I have both a Lite-On and Premium. The Premium is better built.[/quote]

I have backed up more cds than that at once with my 52246S no problems.I'll never buy another plextor again after all the problems I have had with my 708A.

[aviationwiz]

I'll never buy another plextor again after all the problems I have had with my 708A.

Don't even get me started here. If your talking about 8x problems, yes, it is deffinetly a problem, but one that isn't so bad, as we are trying to do it on 4x media. If your talking about DVD-R, everyone on these forums trying to burn DVD-R has been using really cheap, low quality media that they bought online. That isn't a burner problem, it's a media problem. Same goes for a lot of the problems with the LDW-411S (I think, can't say for sure, since I don't have one)

[RJW]

Plextor burns excellent on high quality -R disc's from Maxell and MCC.
The Lite On 401S however burns disc's that are problematic on some players.(Same players can read PLextor 708 burnt disc's from the same brands.)

8x burning of 4x media seems to have it's troubles. But what do you want if you go outside the standards.