Are Cheap DVD Burners Worth the Trouble?

[nukemaster]

Out of curiosity, does anyone else find my earlier statement to be true in general? I almost never have good results when burning over 8x DVD's or over 12x CDs, no matter what drive/pc/cpu configuration and no matter what media I use. Does high speed burning HAVE to cause problems down the line...always? Anyone have any 16x DVDs burned over a year ago that still work flawlessly??

For the record i burn at half speed(24cd 8dvd) most of the time since i am in no hurry(and it should cut the possibility of errors down). I rip @ full, but i can always go down if i get errors. To date even burning at full has not given me any errors yet. But i sure have killed some ODD's(all brands die the same for me) in the past.

I did a quick Nero speedtest of audio CD's in my samsing and it was slow as balls on one CD and had errors at the end but fast on another CD(they are both real non burned CD's so its odd that the other one slows down at the end on all drives). All other drives run normal then get slow at the end where the errors are.... And the disc is not even scratched....Maybe the drive detects the cd quality like liteon's used to. All i know is at the rate i can kill a drive. I just get cheap ones and use them to death....

 

[reconviperone1]

I own a nec 4x dvd burner, a 18x samsung, and a 18x nec, the 4x was 130 dollars years ago, and it works fine, the samsung(i love it) and the other nec were 35 dollars and bothe are really reliable. I wont even put a cd buner in anyones sytem now because dvd buners are so cheap, and i always recomend the 18x samsung with lightscribe.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

Samsung's DVD players are made my NEC. NEC gets their technology from Sony. Sony contracts Liteon to do their work. And Liteon, being a koren manufacture, rebrands their products as Asus/AOpen, and Plextor.



So you see, all drives come from the same source, Korea.

 

[RichPLS]

Out of curiosity, does anyone else find my earlier statement to be true in general? I almost never have good results when burning over 8x DVD's or over 12x CDs, no matter what drive/pc/cpu configuration and no matter what media I use. Does high speed burning HAVE to cause problems down the line...always? Anyone have any 16x DVDs burned over a year ago that still work flawlessly??

I usually only burn temp backups like to take home or give to somebody at high speed... all important backups or movie copies are performed at lower speeds to insure quality copies.

 

[hergieburbur]

If I want to keep it for more than a week or two, I burn at 4x or less. Movies at 1x or 2x. Anything temporary, I just burn at the fastest available, but those are usually RWs.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

Wouldn't it have been nice to read how well the burners did with data integrity at different burn speeds? You might be able to burn disks at 10x with the same quality as 1x.

 

[hergieburbur]

Yes, it would.

I just do it based on experience. When I burn a movie at 10x, it tends to have a lot more noise than one at 4x or 2x.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

I tend to buy movies if I want to enjoy the quality and sound. If its a eh, dont care too much.

 

[hergieburbur]

Depends on the movie. If its good, I buy it on DVD or Blu-ray (none yet), but I still rip it to my HD so that when I travel I can watch it on my laptop using Alcohol without carrying the physical disks.

 

[muddleclass]

Have read this thread with some interest but people (including the reviewer) seem to have missed one or two points:

a) Just reviewing one sample of a DVD writer is probably not enough. I have found that burners are one of the most likely components to fail and there seems to be some variation between samples. Given how cheap burners are now would like to have seen say 3 of each make tested.

b) Most common reason I have experienced for burn failures is cheap discs. I use Verbatim now and have not had a burn failure in the past year at least. When discs were much more expensive I bought a few unbranded from computer fairs with disastrous results. Even the cheaper brands such as Infiniti have a fail rate. Also DVD R- discs seem to me to fail more than DVD R+, however, this again may be the brands have used .

With these caveats have been burning discs at 16 speed without problem.

 

[ikjadoon]

Slightly off topic, but is there any way for me to rip my DVDs for free?

~Ibrahim~

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

DVD Decrypter and Dvd2one

Use both to great success.

 

[gmk]

How can Tom's have such great, technical display & cpu reviews and then publiish a review like this for optical drives? There have been many good points made in responses to this article and I hope they are taken to heart. I would just like to add my 2 cents:
1. There is no high end dvd burner market. There are more expensive drives (e.g. Plextor) but they are not higher quality (the very fact that many Plextor drives in recent years are rebadged "cheap" drives supports this). I have had NEC's (2510 & 3500). Currently
I have Plextors (Premium and 716), Pioneers (111 & 109), Lg (H10N & 4163), Lite On 52327, Benq 1650 (now part of LiteOn), and can say from my experience there is no correlation between performance and price. The reason the Plextor models are worth the money is the other things they do - quality testing and precise control over drive functions.
2. Bringing me to point 2. There are many programs which test burn quality: Plextools, Kprobe, CDSpeed. How you can review a drive without testing burn quality is beyond me. Burn quality is all that matters.
3. Bring me to point 3. Burn quality correlates with media being used. A great drive not only gives great burns but does so with a wide variety of media. Please, in the future, test more drives. But do so with a variety of media and then compare the results. Such a methodology would indeed show that a $100 Plextor does not create better burns than a Pioneer 112 and LG42 - but it can be used to measure the results that prove that, and the LG and Pioneer cannot.
4. Learn about what you are reviewing. LG traditionallly rip locks their drives. Have for years. The writer should have known this instead of being surprised they were so slow at ripping.
5. If the writer did not know all these things, why did he write the article?If he did, why did he not include the information so many responders have asked for? It was great seeing Tom's include an article on optical drives...until I read it. Listen to all the constructive criticism here, you've had some great responses, and DO THE ARTICLE AGAIN - THE RIGHT WAY.

 

[sniffinpoprocks]

Out of curiosity, does anyone else find my earlier statement to be true in general? I almost never have good results when burning over 8x DVD's or over 12x CDs, no matter what drive/pc/cpu configuration and no matter what media I use. Does high speed burning HAVE to cause problems down the line...always? Anyone have any 16x DVDs burned over a year ago that still work flawlessly??

I've got discs from my BenQ 1620 that I burned at max speed a while back and there still fine. and I have pioneer 111 that I always burn my dual layer Verbs at 16x no problems. I think media plays a big part when burning at higher speeds, and the BenQ in particular, continuously adjusts the laser power during each burn to compensate(others may also).

As far as the review :
"The DVR-112 comes with an UltraATA interface, and it offers up to 18X write speeds for DVD-R and DVD+R, up to 10X write speeds for DVD-R dual-layer discs and fast 18X speeds for DVD+R dual layer. "
This drive only does 10x for both dual layer formats, not 18x; may want to update the text.

I love Tom's in general but I think cdfreaks has the market cornered on cd/dvd drive reviews.

 

[choknuti]

2. Bringing me to point 2. There are many programs which test burn quality: Plextools, Kprobe, CDSpeed. How you can review a drive without testing burn quality is beyond me. Burn quality is all that matters.
3. Bring me to point 3. Burn quality correlates with media being used. A great drive not only gives great burns but does so with a wide variety of media. Please, in the future, test more drives. But do so with a variety of media and then compare the results. Such a methodology would indeed show that a $100 Plextor does not create better burns than a Pioneer 112 and LG42 - but it can be used to measure the results that prove that, and the LG and Pioneer cannot.

Great points. These are the 2 foremost things that I look for when choosing an optical drive. I really hope that they redo the review. Leaving it as it is is terrible IMHO better to take it down.

 

[scan]

Samsung's DVD players are made my NEC. NEC gets their technology from Sony. Sony contracts Liteon to do their work. And Liteon, being a koren manufacture, rebrands their products as Asus/AOpen, and Plextor.



So you see, all drives come from the same source, Korea.

REALLY? As far as I know, Samsung makes their DVD writer via TSST (Toshiba-Samsung), not NEC. Nec makes their own chipsets for DVD writer, not from Sony (maybe NEC uses OPU from Sony). Recently Sony started contracting Optiarc (NEC-SONY) to do their work. And Liteon is a Taiwanese company. Asus produces their DVD writer in collaboration with Pioneer. Anybody knows who's OEMing for Plextor?

 

[nukemaster]

Samsung's DVD players are made my NEC. NEC gets their technology from Sony. Sony contracts Liteon to do their work. And Liteon, being a koren manufacture, rebrands their products as Asus/AOpen, and Plextor.



So you see, all drives come from the same source, Korea.

REALLY? As far as I know, Samsung makes their DVD writer via TSST (Toshiba-Samsung), not NEC. Nec makes their own chipsets for DVD writer, not from Sony (maybe NEC uses OPU from Sony). Recently Sony started contracting Optiarc (NEC-SONY) to do their work. And Liteon is a Taiwanese company. Asus produces their DVD writer in collaboration with Pioneer. Anybody knows who's OEMing for Plextor?

Was gonna mention that. It is VERY obvious if you open them up. Hell just looking at the front panels you can tell 99% of the time who the OEM is.

 

[harry_callahan]

I wonder how much Samjunk paid these two to include two of their drives and not include liteon. I won't be wasting any time reading anything else these "journalist" hahaha..... :thumbsdown:

 

[rantonrave]

is there any way for me to rip my DVDs for free?

~Ibrahim~

www.RipIt4Me.org

 

[polarity]

I checked a couple of disks I burned in 2005, and they copied over fine. (Not the best test for them, but they took as long to copy as it said in the dialogue box, with none of the spikes that show that read errors are present, and osx copies can spike very suddenly because the averaging on the copy time is a lot less than in windows).

BenQ DW1620 here too, and those disks were on Ricoh 8x DVD+R media, and were burned at 16x. I gave up on DVD-Rs as there were just too many random errors that would have me burning 3 disks and they'd all fail at exactly the same point, until I shuffled the data round.

As well as quality media you have to make sure your firmware is kept up to date, and be aware of what disks it supports.

From the club.cdfreaks.com forums it's obvious the people who burn a lot switch the firmware around to get the best results from whatever media is available, and it really helps if you can choose media based on the MID code for the disks, instead of some brand name.

The firmware contains a list of MID codes and the drive settings to get the best out of the media, which has that code stored right at the beginning (why there's a ring on blank DVDs). New drives usually have crap firmware, that only writes a few disks well.

Of course if the manufacturer doesn't bother releasing firmware then the drive will never get any better. BenQ does (did?) a lot of firmware updates for their drives, listed all the media that the drive would support for that firmware, and worked closely with the users to develop it.

Go to club.cdfreaks.com and get an idea of how truly pathetic the Toms review is compared to the competition (and spot that BenQ DW16xx drives hold the top 2 spots in the votes for the current best drives, despite not really being available any more).

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

I thought macs only used toast, mac dvd/rw drives and idisk media.

They can use pc stuff too? doesn't that defeat the purpose of going mac?

 

[Phrozt]

Heh... Ok... to all the people who question my maturity; if you cannot tell, I'm tired of his articles. This clearly isn't the first of his that I've read or commented on.

Every single article is the same:

- Poor set up of variables/control
- Poor choice of products to test
- Almost completely useless conclusion (which is what one would expect given the above 2 factors).

As you can tell from my reg date, I've been reading THG for years. I've been building computers even longer. Now, in most of my scathing comments to his reviews, I mention thaty he may, in fact have quite a bit of technical knowledge when it comes to computer hardware, but he puts it together very poorly. Coming from someone who builds and has built computers for a long time (namely me, as well as others who agree with me), the reviews he chooses to slap THG's name on are horrible, and fairly worthless when it comes to making choices on how to spec out a new rig.

Finally, it's funny how you keep referring to me as a 12 year old, given the fact that Patrick Schmid clearly has less than a 12 year old's education when it comes to putting an informational article together.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

Well all in all, we are all little people. I wish we could all band together and never click on this site''s ads until we get our voice and say. I may not have been registered that long, but I have been with the site for many many years. This site was great, though might have taken a bit of skill to navigate, then it got easier, and started going down the drain as far as quality goes.


But oh well... as long as the forums are as entertaining as they are now.

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

Are Cheap DVD Burners Worth the Trouble?

Yes.

 

[harry_callahan]

Right on target with your opinion. I voiced similar thoughts. About 60% of the posters here should @myspace instead of here.