DVD Writer Which to Choose?

[Teac23]

Hello

Over the years Plextor has always been the make to have if you had the cash. Im on the look out for a new drive and i could not help but notice that Plextor drives are some what cheaper now days. I can buy one for as little as £24.00 delivered.

I have just read a post by a videohelp member which has taken the shine off buying my first Plextor drive.

Kerry56 Wrote: Plextors are rebadged Lite-on drives these days. My usual advice for potential Plextor buyers is that if you are going to buy a Lite-on, you might as well pay Lite-on prices.

If this the case i can buy Lite-on drives for cheap as £11.99.

I have tried, Nec, LG, Sony, Samsung, but always found Pioneer a good drive. Should i stick with Pioneer or not?

I'm also having to convert ide to sata using a converter due to ide drives becoming harder to buy now days.

Can anyone please tell me what Drive makes uses the NEC chipsets now days?

Thanks

[jman98]

For what it's worth Pioneer has performed the best for me in recent years.

[orsetto]

If you're very concerned about getting the classic NEC chipset and a certain level of Pioneer build quality, your best bet is to budget higher and buy a new-old-stock Pioneer on eBay. Just about all current DVD burners are bottom-rung commodity items today, with fewer and fewer full-size internal models available as time passes. Pioneers made after 2007 get progressively chintzier and aren't directly comparable to previous bulletproof models like the DVR-111 (which can still be found in IDE versions, sometimes as the DVR-710). Not intending to disagree with jman98 on that point, the later Pioneers perform well enough for most people, but those of us with bad luck in cheap electronics did better with the older Pioneers.

Pioneer has been a bit scatterbrained and unpredictable in its production/marketing of everything except car audio systems in recent years (since their frantic reorganization following the global economic meltdown in 2008). I can't even figure out if they're still actively making full-size internal BluRay burners anymore: last I heard they were quite good, but I've also seen deranged pricing on some of them that appears to be "OMG, they've been discontinued forever!" panic gouging. Pioneer has gone from being one of the most respected companies in the world to one that seems to be going out of business (and then back in again) at a dizzying rate, depending on the product line.

[Kerry56]

The Pioneer blu ray drives still get very good reviews from our users over at MyCE. I have a 207MBK that has been flawless. The 208 has just as good a rep.

I'm afraid the NEC line of chipsets is dying out with the last of the Optiarc drives. Its called a Renesas/NEC chipset in those last Optiarcs, but its based on the old NEC line.