DVD Burner: NEC or Pioneer?

[mikester]

I had the same delima (NEC vs Pioneer) & went with the NEC due to a friend's advice who had one. Never had a coaster & I'm currently getting 16x burns from the latest batch of Taiyo Yuden 8x +R. NEC was $20 cheaper vs Pioneer at Newegg to boot.

[bdgriff]

I will have to STRONGLY suggest going w/NEC just b/c of the very strong community over at cdfreaks and all the work that goes into hacked firmware for the drive. I had the 2500, now have the 3500 and with liggy's or quickee's f/ware applied burn ricohjpn 001's at 12X, (it's 4X rated media), NO COASTERS, TY +R media burn @ 16X (it's 8X media) and some older R03's at 12X. So, I love it..If your set on 2 drives why not the Aopen for Ripping???

[Bullworth]

I really love Pioneer, none of their home or PC products have ever let me down but for the price/performance I'm gonna go with NEC. After reading this article at doom9 I'm not sure I want to splurge all the way on a DL drive, at least not for now.
bdgriff, I already have a Pioneer DVD-ROM for ripping, great drive I'll have to say. Have gone all the way up to 8.9 ripping so I'll stick with it until it gives out, but thanks for the tip on those two. I'll look for them if I have to.

[Quantum]

The LiteOns are pretty poor in professional testing. See here:

http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=13405

The BenQ 1620 Pro is a decent writer. See www.cdrlabs.com and www.cdfreaks.com for reviews that provide error scans in their testing.

The Pioneer DVR-108 is a better drive out of the box than the NEC. The NEC has a lot of third party hacked BIOS support that greatly improves its write quality through write strategy swaps, ect. Although the NEC3520 doesn't appear to have caught the old NEC3500 yet in write quality.

You really can't go wrong with the BenQ1620, NEC3500, or Pioneer DVR-108.

[Bodyslide]

My vote is for the Pioneer. I have owned 3 the 105, 107 and 108. And all 3 are still burning today. The 105 has well over 1500 burns. The 107 around 900. The 108 only 400.

[Epicurus8a]

So far I only burned 5 or 6 discs with my new 109. They were burned at 8x in about 8min. each, and they're all error free. (My 8x Taiyo-Yudens are all reconized as 12x discs.)

The software disc that came with the drive has lots of Ulead software: DMF3.5, CD & DVD PictureShow 3 se, VideoStudio 8 se DVD, Photo Explorer 8.5 se, Burn.Now, DVD Player 1.5, Nova Backup 7.1, & DWS2 (trial). After being disappointed in DMF 3.0, I was surprised to find that DMF 3.5 actually works. So far I haven't experienced any lip-sync problems as I've had with other versions of DMF. I've played around with the other software, but haven't really put them to the test yet.

So far it seems like a good deal....