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."

skip the crap

[spacemky]

Do not pass go; go directly to the summary page:
Final Thoughts: What to buy [extremetech.com]

Buy the Lite-On - use K-Probe

[jbridges]

Besides being the least expensive choice in the review, it's also the only model of the four which is supported by K-Probe.

http://www.cdrlabs.com/kprobe/ [cdrlabs.com]
or
http://www.k-probe.com/ [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? CategoryId=1 [cdrinfo.com]

Pioneer DVR-111D

[LanMan04]

Pioneer DVR-111D [pioneeraus.com.au]

Great IDE Dual-Layer burner, Mac compatible [macsales.com] (works with Toast out-of-the-box, I used Patchburn [macupdate.com] to make it "Apple Supported/Shipped"), apparently Linux compatible [linuxquestions.org], and dirt cheap ($35.99) [newegg.com].

Kicks ass, no coasters, does just about every format. 'nuff said.

Re:Speed, speed, speed...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I agree, though noise measurement isn't that hard to do, the typical hardware site is probably too lazy to do it. Thankfully Storage Review measures hard drive noise (and heat, and I think power), but lately, that is negligible, now the focus has to be put on optical drive noise.

Reliability is harder to measure though, if it doesn't make a coaster during the normal round of tests, then it is probably assumed to be good enough.

There are enthusiast sites like CDFreaks that check P1 and P2 error rates on the written optical media, which is good to check.

Re:Hoping it was VHS-DVD burners...

[BenJeremy]

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.

Re:And Quality of media

[Jherek Carnelian]

Over the years, since the early days of CD-Rs to modern DVD-+R, there has been on constant - Taiyo Yuden. Their quality has always been top-notch. The worst that has happend with them has been counterfeiting - so if you can trust the merchant selling you TY discs is selling legitimate product, you can trust that you are getting media of the highest quality.

What you can also count on with TY is that you will pay a premium. But compared to some of the 'name' brands like Sony, or Memorex, etc (some of whom often - but not always - produce batches that are just rebranded TY's) it may still be cheaper to buy the spindles of TY's.

For me, the premium of 10-20 cents per disc is well worth it - I never worry about the stability or longevity of the burns I make with TY media.