CDRLabs.com

Can anyone confirm that what I’ve read is correct?

NEC - excellent writer, but poor reader
Liteon - a good reader/writer
BenQ - excellent writer and reader
Plextor - the best drives, but expensive

Also, what are the opinions of Pioneer and LG?

Agent_J wrote:Can anyone confirm that what I’ve read is correct?

NEC - excellent writer, but poor reader
Liteon - a good reader/writer
BenQ - excellent writer and reader
Plextor - the best drives, but expensive

Also, what are the opinions of Pioneer and LG?

I would say the folowing:
NEC - excellent writer, ok reader
Liteon - excellent reader, poor writer
BenQ - excellent writer on DVD+R, good reader
Plextor - Over priced, picky, poor reader, no running OPC (yet) and high variability rate between drives
LG - good writer, good reader
Pioneer - excellent writer, good reader

There are exceptions to just about every one of those, but generally I think the above is pretty accurate.

Agent_J wrote:Can anyone confirm that what I’ve read is correct?

NEC - excellent writer, but poor reader
Liteon - a good reader/writer
BenQ - excellent writer and reader
Plextor - the best drives, but expensive

Also, what are the opinions of Pioneer and LG?

Incorrect and depending on your definition of a reader. If you mean a reader drive manufacturers with ability to read copy protected CD's then..

Generally speaking...

NEC - excellent writers, but poor readers
LiteOn - very good writers and excellent readers, but picky on media
Plextor - excellent writers and good readers, but expensive and picky on media

Don't know about other brands.

If you mean a reader as beaing able to read badly scratched discs, there are really no good drive to read them well/fast.

You should really rate individual drives and not the manufacturers.

Shredder wrote:You should really rate individual drives and not the manufacturers.

Very true!

I once had a Plextor 708, and it was a crappy reader. When trying to read badly recorded DVDs (like bad Vivastar using a Pioneer DVR-A03), it b0rked. The drive can't have been faulty, as it has been RMAed before, because the first one *was* faulty.

The LG 4120B, the Pioneer A06 and the Toshiba 1712 can read the same discs (at very low speed like 2x-5x)

Here's my opinion but I (still) live in South Korea.

NEC: good at making good drives but bad at retailing them, has the top place in the world's fastest supercomputer list

Lite-On IT: good at updating firmware files and releasing them but bad at releasing drives ahead of the rest, still a small business compared to most others

BenQ: still part of Acer group which is the Samsung of Taiwan, good at making cheap things but the partnership with Philips of the Netherlands proved to work very well, has great potential

Plextor - the most expensive brand name per drive, but not a leader in technologies and not a leader in market share either, many industry insiders once speculated that Plextor won't make any DVD writer simiply because they have no base technologies and are too greedy

LG: good at making soap in a wartime South Korea, bad at credit card business, two key strategic markets they do (sometimes) better than Samsung, the traditional rival, are LCD panels and optical disk drives. Partnership with Hitachi has also worked extremely well for both Hitachi and LG.

Samsung: No. 2 optical disk drive manufacturer in the world after LG but needs to care more about enthusiasts that use the drives most often and spend most time on web forums telling their experiences to everyone else, how the new partnership with Toshiba will turn out needs some more time to see

Pioneer: lost a great deal of face with the introduction of DVR-A06 which happened to be THE Pioneer drive that changed the value of Pioneer brand name from one of the average to the best of the best among DVD recordable hardware enthusiasts in all three major continents, and and loses a lot of face with the introduction of DVR-A08 which provides DVD+R DL writing but not DVD-R DL writing

Sony: most known for their multiple-standard strategies even before the VHS vs. Betamax time, supports MemoryStick but will support any other standards for portable memory if necessary as was clear with DSC-F828, first used Pioneer DVD-R writers for some of their PC systems but used Ricoh DVD+RW and later DVD+RW/DVD+R writers to sell under Sony brand name, later developed their own drives that support both DVD-R and DVD+R/DVD+RW writing, and of course DVD-RW, too, but that is hardly used among desktop PC users for recording, can't compete against South Korean and Taiwanese manufacturers so just made a temporary strategic alliance with Lite-On IT of Taiwan but has had their own post-DVD products on the market even before the alliance with Lite-On IT.

Matsushita: two things to be said here. Nobody uses DVD-RAM from Matsushita. However, the people who do use DVD-RAM from Matsushita often say DVD-RAM is the best which reminds me of Apple in the 1990s. That's not saying I doesn't like DVD-RAM. I do.

JVC: not known for DVD writers but many people in the US, Japan, and South Korea at least prefers JVC D-VHS recorders to any DVD writer on the market for data backup even if it's not as flexible and as fast as 16x DVD+R on PC.

Philips: hated by Pioneer and some Pioneer fans but has helped DVD writer market to grow faster and DVD+R 16x was a Philips invention.

Ricoh: the first Sony and HP DVD writers were made by Ricoh and Ricoh 2.4x DVD+RW/DVD+R drives were cheaper than Pioneer DVR-A04 and it seems Ricoh has not yet completely given up DVD recordable market.

BTC: another good manufacturer in Taiwan that makes all sorts of hardware products in the quest of an independent Taiwan. perhaps being closer to Japan and the West can't hurt like Lite-On IT and LG Electronics.

Who else?

^^^
Thanks for the informative post Kennyshin, so who makes the best dvd rw drives ?

Agent_J wrote:^^^
Thanks for the informative post Kennyshin, so who makes the best dvd rw drives ?

I'd say Mitsubishi or Taiyo Yuden but they make media, not drives.

Making drives is a heavily labor-intensive process, therefore, they often go to somewhere in the middle of China or southern China near Guangzhou and Hong Kong to produce them. You have to ask "who makes the best DVD writers for US$50?" instead. Anyone can make a DVD writer that can also write to 15 to 50GB optical media and even to HDD connected to LAN and 1394/USB for a few thousands.

dolphinius_rex wrote:I would say the folowing:
NEC - excellent writer, ok reader
Liteon - excellent reader, poor writer
BenQ - excellent writer on DVD+R, good reader
Plextor - Over priced, picky, poor reader, no running OPC (yet) and high variability rate between drives
LG - good writer, good reader
Pioneer - excellent writer, good reader

There are exceptions to just about every one of those, but generally I think the above is pretty accurate.

I think dolphinus_rex nailed it right on. I have and or do own the NEC 1300,LiteOn 832S,Plextor 708A and Pioneer 106d and 107d. I will stick to Pioneer. I ordered a pioneer 108 today.

Hello!

NEC: The newer are good writers, but poor readers
Liteon: Good reader, but terrible writer
Benq: I don´t know
Plextor: Best writer (with his favorite´s media)with good features and very good reader

LG: Excellent reader, very good writer (but not the fastest)
Pioneer: Good writer, average reader

Kennyshin wrote:Here's my opinion but I (still) live in South Korea.


Samsung: No. 2 optical disk drive manufacturer in the world after LG but needs to care more about enthusiasts that use the drives most often and spend most time on web forums telling their experiences to everyone else, how the new partnership with Toshiba will turn out needs some more time to see

Who else?

I thought Liteon is the No.2 of optical drives?

Scour wrote:

Kennyshin wrote:Here's my opinion but I (still) live in South Korea.


Samsung: No. 2 optical disk drive manufacturer in the world after LG but needs to care more about enthusiasts that use the drives most often and spend most time on web forums telling their experiences to everyone else, how the new partnership with Toshiba will turn out needs some more time to see

Who else?

I thought Liteon is the No.2 of optical drives?

That's probably because you've heard the same thing from one source only. Since you think Samsung is trash, why bother? Read it as if I said nothing about Samsung here.

Most of these generalizations are really useless, since one model to another from the same manufacturer can have totally different positive and negative aspects and features. I agree that we should be discussing in model numbers here, and not just manufacturers...

wesociety wrote:Most of these generalizations are really useless, since one model to another from the same manufacturer can have totally different positive and negative aspects and features. I agree that we should be discussing in model numbers here, and not just manufacturers...

Right. That's also called stereotyping sometimes. It's not good to say Toyota is fast or Kodak is clean. Personally, I'd like to know more about what's going on inside the companies and also more about what's going on the brains of key employees and executives.