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DVD Burner Comparison
mikemuch writes "While you're waiting for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, you may want to check out ExtremeTech's roundup of dual-layer DVD burners. Starting at about $43US, some of them are quite powerful, come with nice bundled software, and are pretty good deals, to boot."
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Final Thoughts: What to buy
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
One area the article completely ignores is the quality of the burns? They don't mention if they had any troubles playing back anything that was burned on these drives. Compatibility with existing dvd players is a big deal and it would have been nice to see some mention of this in the test. Having the ability to burn a dvd that only half of my friends/family can play twice as fast (or half the cost) is useless.
Why do these kinds of reviews always focus on speed alone? Who cares if it takes a couple of minutes longer to burn a DVD with one drive versus another? It's not like you have to sit there with baited breath as the DVD burns -- you can do other things.
I'd rather see a comparison of noise or rate-of-coaster-production. I recently got a new DVD burner which works rather well as far as speed and reliability, but is way too noisy, even when I'm just playing a DVD with it. I have to use my old DVD-ROM drive for playback.
I guess its harder to test those things, though. You can't just load up some benchmark it let it run.
And still no comments on whether or not the Linux support will be alright. Whether the burner is good or not doesnt matter to me until I know I can run it at home. Am I the only Linux user concerned? Considering Im posting on /., and other /.ers are reading, I imagine not. But I could have missed some major article or something concerning it. Would somebody shed some light for me?
Besides being the least expensive choice in the review, it's also the only model of the four which is supported by K-Probe.
? CategoryId=1
http://www.cdrlabs.com/kprobe/
or
http://www.k-probe.com/
And if you actually care about burners, read the reviews from a quality site that actually reviews virtually all the models, does far more exhaustive tests, and has a very active technical forum. CDR Info.
http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Home.aspx
"Starting at about $43US, some of them are [...] pretty good deals, to boot."
I can't speak for other users, but I don't boot from CD enough for booting performance to factor in at all when selecting optical drives. This guy has gotta be some die-hard Windows Me enthusiast.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Overpriced media, really. Just use a sharpie.
Although the price of Dual Layer (DL) media has come down, it's still $2 - $4 a disk, vs $0.50 - $1.00 for comparable Single Layer disks. So, although you do need two disks, burning information to a single layer disk is still cheaper, about twice as much. I bought a DL burner quite awhile ago, but I'm still waiting for good news regarding media. IMHO, until the media comes down, Dual Layer just doesn't cut it.
I'd also like to see a site reviewing the quality of media for CD-R and DVD-R. The thing I care about is not speed, but reliability. And the Media may affect that more than the burner itself. There's a wide variety of prices on media but nothing to really guide you on quality and longevity.
Over the long run the cost of the burner may be small compared to the cost of the media, so there's no big reason to scrimp on the burner price. But there's a big reason to scrimp on the media. Plus of course unreliable media may lose very valuable data. So it's important to understand reliability of media.
I can't find any discussions of this that are not terribly outdated. It seems like every manufarcturer is constantly changing media names and makes several different lines. (e.g. look at Ritek). But on-line stores don't offer enough information to discern what might make one better than the other. (e.g. info on dyes, or disk construction).
Anyone have some reasonably fresh or comprehensive discussions of this. Or list the names of DVD or CD-r you had reliability problems with. Were the problems Batch-like (e.g. if one CD in the cake-box was bad were many of them bad) or random?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Pioneer DVR-111D
Great IDE Dual-Layer burner, Mac compatible (works with Toast out-of-the-box, I used Patchburn to make it "Apple Supported/Shipped"), apparently Linux compatible, and dirt cheap ($35.99).
Kicks ass, no coasters, does just about every format. 'nuff said.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Having done exactly what the parent was talking about, I can advise against using a capture card. I tried a Hauppauge 150 and an ATI TV Wonder Elite and couldn't get the colors to come out well at all. The image was also a lot softer that I would have liked. I borrowed a VHS->DVD unit from a friend (I'm sorry, this was 6 months ago, I don't remember the brand off-hand) and the results were far better than what my PC pulled off.
I would concur with this.
I have a Toshiba DVD Recorder/VCR (Techincal term for standalones is "Recorder" not "Burner" which refers to the Drive) and it works well enough, but doesn't work to archive my commercial tapes (my intention is to convert them to DVD for archival purposes and into a format that lets my 6 year old play them on his PC without messing with the tapes) - this is due to Macrovision.
HOWEVER - some products, like KWorld's capture cards, ignore Macrovision, so you can perform the conversion to MPEG2 and then quickly author a DVD from that.
Well, that's nice. Too bad only one of those in signficant in the Optical drive mass market - Lite-On. HP drives are going to pretty much be in HP systems. Plextor offers the most expensive drives around and they're just not that interesting to people.
Maybe they should have included Sony, ToshibaSamsung, NEC, or some other companies that actually sell a shitload of drives on the retail market. Lite-On was a good call, though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"