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All right. Going to add a burner.
Main needs: as close to perfect burn quality with TY (+R)/Verbatium MCC media (ie, I only will be using the highest quality discs). Verbatiums I'll only buy if they are NOT the "Made In Taiwan" discs.
Speed here is unimportant. I'll burn 8x discs at 8x if the quality is going to be better!

I will need to burn some DVD+R DL discs. Here, the Plex seems to have the advantage. Yes, the 1640 is faster, but the Plex has higher burn quality. Of course, haven't seen what the 1640 can do at lower speeds, so...

Plex also comes in SATA - an advantage for me, due to case design (and number of optical drives) that makes routing IDE cables to the top of the tower a pain.

I do not care about medium/low quality media burning. For that, I have my BenQ 1620 Which also does great with just about anything.

So: thoughts? Or am I missing a drive that I should be paying attention too? Hey, if I could get a new Pioneer 107 I would - and use only TY -R's. Those burned on my old 107 were close to perfect. I miss that drive

Good luck finding any Verbatim media not made in Taiwan, unless you're in Europe, and you might find some Verbatim made in India. To the main topic, though, since you have a BenQ drive already give the 716SA a whirl if it won't cost you too much. Then you can compare scans of burns done on both drives with CD Speed (with the BenQ) and PlexTools (with the Plex), a hobby which can easily become obsessive!

Gen-An wrote:Good luck finding any Verbatim media not made in Taiwan, unless you're in Europe, and you might find some Verbatim made in India.

After reading many threads I´m sure that Made in Taiwan is still better than Made in India.

Scour wrote:

Gen-An wrote:Good luck finding any Verbatim media not made in Taiwan, unless you're in Europe, and you might find some Verbatim made in India.

After reading many threads I´m sure that Made in Taiwan is still better than Made in India.

I really don't have a problem with MCC media made in Taiwan; I just wish Prodisc and CMC especially would tighten up the quality control. I've had batches of CMC-made MCC003 that were perfect, while others had serious problems (mainly near the outer edge). Some people seem to have an instant bias against anything CMC touches, but frankly I've had good results even with CMC's own 8x +R media.

Scour wrote:

Gen-An wrote:Good luck finding any Verbatim media not made in Taiwan, unless you're in Europe, and you might find some Verbatim made in India.

After reading many threads I´m sure that Made in Taiwan is still better than Made in India.

Verbatim 8x DVD-R: Made in Taiwan (Prodisc) are worse than Made in India (MBIL) on BenQ 1620.
but this is (probably?) an issue of the drive, not liking this particular Verbatim DVD-R Prodisc media.