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hey guys..

i have a pioneer 106d burner with hacked firmware, and i really like the drive. however, i'm looking for an upgrade, cause for some reason the 106d is starting to give me coasters (mostly when burning at 4x).

from my local retailer, i basically have two options: the lg 4163b and the pioneer 109. it's important to notice that the latter is about 50% more expensive than the former.

which one should i choose? i don't even plan on burning stuff faster than 8x anyway (i always rather be on the safe side, cause i mostly burn backups), and i don't really believe in DL yet. one thing i REALLY need to know is: are both drives able to rip movies at full speed? that's really essential for me. also, how are both drives when it comes to media compatibility? i plan on using ritek's dvd-r's mostly (or i could use +R too, dunno).

tnx for the help!

Neither drive rips at full speed. The Pioneer rips at 5x and the LG at 8x. If you don't care about the warranty, you can flash the 109 with the A09 firmware and rip at full speed.

Hello!

Both are good burners, not easy to say which one better is.

I vote for the Pioneer, because it´s the newer one with better specifications like DVD-R DL, DVD+RW 8x and DVD-RW 6x.

The XL-versions from Pioneer can rip DVD-Video at full speed, DVD-R/+R at 12x max, DVD-Video DL at 12x max. The 109 is very slow, max. 5x

The Pioneer has good writing-quality with the most media, but burns some 8x-media and newer 16x-media at lower speeds (but maybe this would be fixed with new Firmware)

For important data I would never use Ritek. The 8x DVD-R can be burnt at high quality with many drives, but in the c´t-test it don´t has a good stability and is not to recommend for backup´s. The 8x DVD+R don´t have good quality with many drives, also not to recommend

Use Taiyo Yuden, Ricoh or Verbatim for backup´s.

Thanks a lot for the help guys..

The warranty issue is not really a problem for me. It´s great to know that I can make the 109 rip dvds at full speed. Can the same be done with the LG 4163 drive (by using a hacked firmware or something)?

And wow, I thought Ritek 8x´s were great quality discs.. It sucks to be unable to do those tests to check for the quality of burns, it sort of leaves me in the dark. Are there any brands other than the ones you mentioned that should give me A-quality burns at 8x with any of these two burners? I only ask this because where I live I have a limited selection of media available...

Hello!

Look at this, there you find some good Info for media-quality, stabililty and recorder-compatibility

http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic. ... 231#142231