what dvd burner drive would you recommend?

great links catfreak. I've got them pasted into my note pad for future reference when I get my 1640. The comptatability of those benq backups on stand alone players/drives are phenomenal when you booktype the plus format to dvd-rom.

 

The ability to booktype is over rated imho, only OLD dvd players have a problem, and in years of burning I've only met one player that had a problem, it is now history.

But the BenQ 1640 with the BenQ SOFTWARE is the bomb. A few months back I upgraded my trusty old NEC 2510 to a NEC 3540, was very disappointed with the burns of the 3540 so I got a BenQ 1640, burns better but still not what I was used to with the old NEC 2510 and Herrie's firmware. Upgraded the firmware on the BenQ and downloaded the BenQ software and used "Solid Burn" on all the disks. WOW, great scores on all media (must "teach" the software the different media).

My only concern in the BenQ build quality, often the eject button doesn't operate on the first push, and during the burns it will make "zapping" sounds at irregular intervals. After two weeks it's still burning, but I wonder how long it will last. Anyone else with this drive, and if so, does your's make noises like an electric bug zapper during some burns?

 

Maybe over-rated for some of those lower quality burners with the bit-setting capability,but not on both my benq 1620s.

I have an I/O Magic 16x with only 20 burns sitting in a box,because of stand alone compatability.It had it's own booktyping utility and the dash format way outperformed those dvd-rom backups by a mile.

I pass a few backups around to my friends and family,and they pass them around to other friends. I had no trouble with them playing my booktyped dvd-rom backups off my main benq 1620.The problems arrose when I'd pass around backups off my other backup pc. First using that I/O Magic 16x and then buying a second benq 1620. The second benq took care of that issue.

By my last estimate,only 1 very old ps2 out of 50+ drives-cannot play my dvd-rom backups. That's near perfect compatability.My other 3 pc dvd-rw drives couldn't even come close to that rate.

Burning on the fly? No problem with my benqs at 100% rate.I wouldn't even dare with those other 3 drives of mine,and 1 of them is a brand new lightscribe HP!

If you play your backups in many different stand alones/game consoles/and pc drives,you need that booktyping capability as well as a quality burner.

The benq 1640 will be my next burner.I've only got 1500+ burns on my main benq so I have a long ways to go before I wear out this quality drive. Only 1 burn coaster this year,on about 1000 backups including on the fly! I did have about 5 playback coasters due to a bad disc every once in a while.

 

 Before I booktyped, I used to send device setup software to my customers and had a return rate of 20% due to unreadable discs .. After I started booktyping 2 years agp, I've sent out approx 250 discs (mostly Verbatim) and have had ZERO returns ... When I'm paying postage both ways and paying for the discs, this ends up saving me a lot of beer money!

 I guess that booktyping DOES MATTER!!!

 

This is a little off topic, but it is about the benq 1640.

When I burn onto new dvd+rw media, the drive will erase the whole disk before writing. This adds 25 minutes to my burn time. I tried to quick erase the disk before burning, but I get a message that the media needs to be formatted before it can be quick erased.

Any "used" disk is fine. It will do a quick erase and then burn.

If I start the erase procedure, abort it after a minute and then burn the disk, it will do a quick erase and then start burning. I guess the drive detects the disk as "used"---formatted---so it does the quick erase.

I have two other dvd burners that do not erase the whole disk before burning. I tried two iso burning programs, same thing, so it seems to be related to the drive.

I am using the newest firmware: bslb.