CD writers, what is your opinion

[jolo]

I have a pioneer 106s DVD - ROM, but I'm looking to purchase a better CD writer. I'm going to pass on the DVD writers for now.

Would like to know your opinion on the newer CD writers out there. Are there quality and dependability issues ? Are they so standard, that price is the only ocnsideration ? 40X not ready yet ? etc .

Thanks in advance.

Jolo (Jon)

[Haegar]

Well, I recently had to make that decision, too, because my old HP 9200+ (SCSI) seemed to be messed up.

I chose an LG GCE8320B at 149 EUR (EIDE), for the following reasons:

- it is mentioned on www.elby.org's compatibility list
- it is capable of SAO
- it had been tested with high marks

Another choice would have been a LiteOn CDRW recorder, they're also listed on elby and are even cheaper, but I didn't manage to find out whether they are SAO capable.

My reasons:

I don't only burn VCD/SVCD, but sometimes disks with SECUROM / SAFEDISK etc. (which is absolutely legal in Germany, as long as I am the owner of the CD) for backup purposes (I have two children that still don't manage to treat CD's the way they should).

SAO is needed for CDRDAO (with non-SAO burners like my HP I only receive 'Could not send Cuesheet'), because while I do the DVD-SVCD-Conversion (which is perfectly legal... see above) with DVD2SVCD on Wintendo 98 SE, I store the resulting images on a JFS-formatted harddisk used with OS/2 (and SAO enables me to burn these images directly under that OS) after I had several FAT32-based data desasters.

Well, I don't want to start an OS war here, this is simply a description of my special situation.

Up to now I'm absolutely content with that writer. It runs quietly and stable, is fast enough for me (though it doesn't sport UDMA) and has an excellent hardware-based burnproof feature.
Drawbacks:
The only burning speeds available for CD-R are 8*, 16*, 24* and 32*. But since I found that the burning speed doesn't have any impact on how good VCDs/SVCDs can be played (at least on my Cyberhome), I don't care about reducing the speed (as long as the media can cope with it, until now I haven't found any 32* capable CD-Rs).

If you're looking for a SCSI burner (and don't care about SAFEDISK), Plextor has always been a decent choice (well, I guess this also goes for their EIDE models). Sanyo might be interesting, too (AFAIK even Plextore uses Sanyo drives now and then), but they're hard to be found around here

In my case I had to give up SCSI, but only because there doesn't seem to be any model suitable for the SAFEDISK stuff any more, and most of them are comparatively slow according to their specs.

[Fossilhauler]

Try checking out www.cdr-info.com, they have a 40x CD-RW roundup. Personally I like Plextor drives.