Please don't take the question as an insult - I'm just wondering what good these tests and reviews really are if it turns out that many of those celebrated new stars of hardware appear to be malfunctioning quite often when sold to the public.
My motivation: I used to have a LG GSA-4082B DVD-Writer. It worked just fine for a couple of months and then it went mad. Stopped playing DVDs properly, didn't recognize different media at all or didn't burn them as expected. Tried all availalbe FW - to no avail. So I sent it back to Amazon.de and got my money back.
Now I'm trying to find myself a new writer. I read all those reviews. Especially the Plex 712A sounded great in many tests but all the same there seem to be a lot of people complaining about them. Same story with my former writer (the LG). Those user comments at Amazon.de were very favourable - still it died unexpectedly.
How useful is an assessement of quality (and reliability???) such as a review? BTW: I read the two threads about "My best DVD-Burner" and "My worst DVD-Burner" initiated by LITEONRULES. The quintessence - there's such thing as a perfect burner.
I just don't know whether to opt for the 712a, wait for a proper version of the 716a or just take... maybe the new LG 4163. Comments?
Oh, one last thing: The question of "quality of buring" was often raised. What do these test by PlexTools and others mean? Do I have to be concerned as a non-professional user, if the results are less than "perfect"?