Wow! I should have been paying more attention to this thread! LOL
I for one wish more manufacturers would be like LG and pay more attention to writing quality then following the crowd of other manufactures. I'm sick and tired of drive makers selling products which push discs WAY beyond their specs, and way beyond their tolerances, and create a situation where data is no longer being stored in a way that we can expect to be able to retreive it later when we need it. I've heard a lot of complaints about LG DVD burners... but they almost always come down to the basic "it's not as fast as other drives" issue. If you want a really fast drive, get the NEC 3500 and hack the firmware. Or get the DVR-108 and use the nx4all firmware, and you can create 16x coasters on any media you like!
Let me give an example of drive support done properly
I picked up some Acer 4x DVD+Rs recently. These discs had the "DVD+R 8x" written in the mirror band of the disc, and had a "NANYA RJB" code as a MID. So I popped one in my BenQ DW1620, and it immediatly recognized the disc as 16x compatible!! (not bad for a 4x DVD+R eh?). So I burned it using Nero CD/DVD's Data Discs Creation utilility, and what speed did it burn at? 4x, and not a second faster! Why? because the disc couldn't handle it. Most likely, it was a "downgrade" 8x DVD+R made by Nanya, which are often sold off as cheap 4x media instead of as 'B Grade' discs (who else do we know who does this? it starts with an 'R'). Anyways, long story short, the burn was well done. The WOPC function in the BenQ drive made the right call, and the burn was pretty decent. The jitter/beta scores were not what I would have liked (below -5% beta!!) but the disc is ok on my PC DVD drives. At a faster speed, the disc probably would have failed with high jitter/beta errors (which supports my 'B Grade 8x DVD+R theory). My friend's Plextor 708a however could only produce coasters on these discs, because they were burned too fast!
Now, Why I traded Taiyo Yuden 8x DVD+Rs for a spindle of 'B Grade' Nanya DVD+Rs that I already knew were coasters in waiting, I'll leave to your imaginations
Punch Cards -> Paper Tape -> Tape Drive -> 8" Floppy Diskette -> 5 1/4" Floppy Diskette -> 3 1/2" "Flippy" Diskette -> CD-R -> DVD±R -> BD-R
The Progression of Computer Media