Which Blu-Ray Burner to buy?

[IInuyasha74]

Hello,

I am thinking about buying a Blu-Ray burner. I have a pretty well built up PC and the only thing I feel I am really lacking to look at my system and say it is complete is a Blu-Ray drive, as I don't own anything which can play Blue-Rays at the moment and they seem to be coming down in price. Figured now is a good time to get one and not have to worry about it again for a long time.

I am between 3, but if you know of a cheaper good one I would be happy to consider it.

$47 after discount codes
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827135252

$49.99 after discount codes
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136250

$64.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136269

From what I am seeing, the Asus drive is the slowest drive of the bunch, and not as good of a buy. The two LG drives are almost identical from what I can tell except one of them writes at 14x and the other writes at 16x. I know that this might make a difference of a minute or two while burning large Blu-ray disks, but other than that is there any advantage to the newer drive?

Any input would be appreciated.

 

[christinebcw]

For years, the LG DVD burners were denigrated because for using low-end chipsets and allowing fewer good firmware updates. Their BluRay burners, on the other hand, have enjoyed a far better reputation in BluRay, DVD and CD burning across a variety of good media. (And "good media" is still important.)

Strangely, BluRay drives enjoy a reputation that "older generations are better" which means "firmware can be updated to include better burns on more media". And "generations" are often Speeds - 12x is sometimes considered 'more reliable' than 14x, which is better than 16x, etc.

Frankly, "Better" is subject to so many variables, though. "Good media" wins in just about all cases.

The Pioneers (from the old, no-longer-on-sale 206 and 207s, to the newer "208" and "209" series) enjoy a reputation for the best burners BUT those also have RipLock technology installed (or in Pioneer's parlance 'UltraQuiet') which some commercial disks use to slow the read-times down. Not many do, but some will.

Asus BluRay drives are often considered 'lesser' than top-reputed Pioneer and Close-2nd LGs.

If you 'get into Scanning a Burn' - if you know what that means - then LG is your choice. If you don't believe "Scanning a Burn" is a worthy function, then I'd give a nod toward Pioneers - which will be $20 more.

And I might also recommend a Retail Package that includes some BluRay Playing Software, especially if you're getting a drive with "BDXL" capabilities so you'll have software that can utilize the Xtra Layer.

(Most students of BluRay drives do not degrade a drive because of a lower speed rating. Frankly, are you burning a disk to win a speed contest, or are you burning it to watch the disk? "Haste makes waste" and most often "slow and steady" means the best reliable burns. Watching them, or storing the data, should be far more important than winning some race against a stopwatch.)

 

[IInuyasha74]

I really appreciate your time in writing all that out for me because you hit on a lot of things I was thinking about but didn't mention.

For example, I also saw the Pioneer brand:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827129075

Which I can have for just $55, but it didn't list the access time so I wasn't sure. Also while I am familiar with with Asus to know they are typically good quality parts, and I know LG is a little fishy some times being good sometimes terrible but I haven't really heard about Pioneer at all. I guess its a good thing I decided to make a post here cause I was really tempted to just get the Asus but the slower speeds made me hesitate and want to double check things first.

Also what is "Scanning a burn"? I'm not big on optical drives so I don't really know. I got that I can burn DVDs about 10 years ago and since then I haven't cared to keep read up on it.

As for the BluRay software, it is a good thing you mentioned it also. I don't think I will be burning anything bigger than a Dual-layer for quite some time. I am more getting the drive for watching and ripping Blu-rays and just want to have the option to burn later if I need to. Do you need special software for all Blu-ray function or just the BDXLs?

I get what you are saying about the speed of the drives. I was mostly going off the speed to judge the age of the drive and thinking that I might as well get the faster one just because. I didn't really put much thought into thinking the higher speed one might be less reliable or stable

 

[IInuyasha74]

For the software, looking at the Asus drive it said it came with this, so I googled it.
http://www.cyberlink.com/stat/product/free-zone/enu/free-software-static.jsp

Its apparently free and can burn BDXL disks. Do I need another software for playing the disks or is that all I needed it for?

 

[christinebcw]

A website like MYCE.COM has tons of 'studies' and folks that do custom firmwares, lotsa testing between lotsa media, lotsa drives. It's often "too much" though to peruse and decide.

The Pioneers have held a Top Reputation for Burning for a long time. (I want to say "reputation" as opposed to some pretense of Absolute True State Of The Universe. ALL of these are subjective and EVERY device can crap out. You are guaranteed NOTHING. The best products fail. The cheapest crappiest ones can be the Very Best.)

ASUS earned a good reputation for DVD burners then as the DVD Burner Market closed (you won't see any new Pioneer DVD burners marketed, not for a year), ASUS switched suppliers and their last DVD burners are supposedly "much less".

(There is a chipset inside drives that contains the logic to Read, Burn, controls speeds, etc. And like any computer part, there are cheap crummy versions and good expensive ones. Now that the DVD Burner Market is practically kaput, guess which one of those is now filling up the last DVD burners? Yeah.)

The Chipset Quality Issues are still divergent in the BluRay market, though, and Pioneer and surprisingly LG use Better Ones, and supposedly Asus and LiteOn use crummier ones.

WHAT IS SCANNING? You understand the concept of "Data Verification After Burn", yes? Most software can perform this "matching" process.

Well, an Optical Disk Scan doesn't pay attention to the bits and bytes of data - it pays attention to the pits and paths of the Burn Process. It studies how the chemical data-layer is etched, not etched, stretched, deflective qualities of the plastic shield, etc. "This disk has a Good Burn" means "The data-layer seems to be perfect." Now - whether the data's any good, well, that's the Data Verification concept!

But Scanning is an After-The-Fact issue. And there is almost a religious following of advocates. "Heathen witch! You don't scan?!! How can you tell if you've got a good burn? Oh my!" Well simple. I plug a disk in and see if it plays smoothly. If it jitters, stalls, etc, it's a bad burn.

Simple.

The Scan Process supposedly tells me this, too. It also gives a diagnosis (or prognosis) of the Very Important Factor: "Does This Burner like This Media?"

No other factor is more important than that.

Scanning can offer the best clue for that.

Do you understand that Burned Optical Disks deteriorate? Yes. The petrochemical plastic shield, the bonding glues and the chemical data-films are not "forever" combinations. Very sad - we were all led by our noses with "100 year promises!!" We'll be lucky if disks last 10-12 years, 20 or 30 at the top. Sad, isn't it? Drat...

But it gets worse.

Let's assume Pioneers are the best burners, OK? LG's are second-best.

Pioneer refuses to allow Scanning Technology into their drives. So you can't perform a Scan with a Pioneer.

LG, Asus, LiteOn, Sony, etc, allow Scans. But those aren't as good of burners.

Uh... think about it. "Why should I trust a lower-rated Burning Drive that claims to scan?"

"Why should I trust engineers to design a drive that doesn't burn very well, but they claim it can Scan?"

THIS is the dilemma, therefore.

I don't bother Scanning. I just don't believe in it. We produced tens of thousands of disks, hundreds of thousands. We play them, we play them on umpteen devices. We play them over time. IF we scanned some, what if a few failed? What would we do then? "Issue a recall for 80,000 disks!!" Uh. Riiiight.

"Why not just send out another backup rather than alarming everyone on Iffy Scan Readings? If we're THAT concerned with a client's backup disks... why not send 'em Set #2?"

So we don't scan.

 

[christinebcw]

By the way, I also believe in the "Everything's a crap shoot" philosophy about Media.

If I buy great media today, there is NO promise that next months' purchase will have the same quality. And one assembly line might yield different quality from another.

So everything's a crap shoot. Always make a back-up. On different media. That's the safest way if that stuff is important.

IF YOU DON'T RECOGNIZE MARKETING TERMS - like BDXL - then don't worry about them. And burning to Dual Layers on BluRays is really REALLY iffy. I simply avoid doing that. "Accept some video compression - use great software for that, and leave everything on a single layer."

That's what I do. It's only a movie, after all. Pass the popcorn. Hit my hubby when he's eaten the last bit. These are the important things in life.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Yea I totally get what you are saying about the scanning bit. Thanks again for the great explanation. It does sound a lot like a more advanced "Verify Data after Write" feature, which I never use anyways. Like you I just try the disk, if it doesn't work I burn another one, if it works then I say its good until I either don't want it anymore or it dies, I wouldn't waste my time with a second burn over a possible stutter in a movie that may or may not exist. Though it does sound a little helpful to see if maybe one type or brand of Blu-ray disk works better with that particular brand of disk drive because of different headers and firmware, but other than that it sounds pretty much useless.

Honestly my main use will be to rip Blu-ray disks onto my desktop. I know the disks will eventually get scratched up or wear down from heat or other factors so I always consider disks to be a good way for distributing movies but not the best way to store them.

For burning, I was kind of hoping that software tools existed that allowed for the creation of multi-video Blu-ray disks. I know DVD tools exist like this and I can typically fit an entire season of a TV series I like onto a single DVD, and was thinking a full series on one Blu-Ray would be epic!
That and compacting the many Disney movies my niece and nephew have down to just a few Blu-Ray disks would be great cause then they could have everything all together and play one movie after another.
The dual layer disks I was more thinking would be really cool for use as DATA disks but come to think of it that is made kind of useless in that function thanks to large capacity USB drives and external hard drives, which I already have several of.


Anyways thanks I greatly appreciate your help. From your posts I expanded the drives I was looking at between two LG drives, two Pioneer drives, and an ASUS drive. Then dropped off the ASUS and 16x LG based off this information seeing as ASUS seems to be a little lower end for these drives, and the 16x is really new with few reviews so I don't want to risk it will be faulty.
In the end though, I am going to go with the cheaper of the two Pioneer drives. It has a lot of good reviews and you pointed out they have had a lot of good drives out recently that have worked well and be very reliable. It lacks software, or at least it doesn't mention any, but I will get by with that free software suite for now and pick up some really nice stuff when a big sale comes.

Thanks again for all your help

 

[Confucious]

(Just noticed this is an old post, but the warning is CURRENT!)

Guys, I bought an LG MODISC blue ray rewriter double layer brand new. After 3 months (very rarely even used)? It started not wanting to read at times. 1 month later (still pretty much never used) I started smelling (burning electrical smell "like when a PC fan burns up") randomly from my computer. My system started booting VERY SLOWLY, at times with errors, or no boot at all without manual (select boot) of hard drive. I have a t5500 workstation with brand new 72 GB triple channel ram, and dual quad Xeon processors. So I was WORRIED! I tore it down cleaned it, blew out every single component with air pressure. Checked my fans, and everything visually, as well as running each fan. It worked ok about 3 days, then BLUE SCREENED! Then the smell got stronger. At this times the LG BD stopped working. Took it apart? It was FRIED with practically NO USE! I uplugged it? Rebooted, but still slow, with no smell. After disabling the port it used? Lightning fast booting, zero errors. In a nutshell? The LG BD burner not only FRIED practically never used, (from the way it was? looked like it was wore slap out til it smoked! All I can figured it must have been spinning up empty non-stop since day 1!) I fear it damaged my port as well maybe. Try to contact LG? When you finally do get someone? They simply blame your system? (You know workstations are reliable workhorses. If you ever owned 1) "WELL BUILT"! I used dual DVD drives from Pioneer 2 years, not 1 single problem. I am very angry, and wouldn't pee on another LG drive if it was on FIRE.... lol Just something to think on? My T5500 was a VERY well built (perfectly error free running system), til I put that LG drive in it. DON'T DO IT. They are BUILT VERY CHEAP, with low grade parts now! Breaking? Is 1 thing. FRYING, and damaging your system? That is simply too much. ESPECIALLY WHEN PRACTICALLY NEVER USED? Not worth saving 10-50 bucks, unless you own a throw-away when done computer.... Best regards, Johnny