Opinions on HP, LG DVD writers???

[Dew]

I presently do backups with BenQ 162I external burner and the Sony 810UL with 3 notebooks with Any Dvd on all of them and one with Slysoft Clone Dvd, and one with 1 Click Dvd Copy and the other with Nero and in all cases I burn in DVD ROM.

Am a happy camper with all my backups playable in our diverse family standalone players.

I posted an earlier thread re software for these burners to put a proper image on them instead of scrawled writing as i don't like labels. However after more googling I realize that the only way is lightscribe and so I am posting 3 models that I am looking at.

1. the external LG 16X Lightscribe GSA-E10L , 16X and $109 cdn at the Future Shop. Not much on google for reviews.
I had a LG a year and a half ago and had a lot of trouble with my family not all being able to view my backups on their standalone players so I got rid of it and replaced it with my BenQ and Sony and set them for DVD ROM and no problems, I am now wondering if LG has a setting for DVD ROM or is it still stuck in the dark ages of my last unit that I got rid of?
I have a large inventory of regular R+ media that I use on my present burners which I gather will be useless on this lightscribe unit, is that correct?
Is this LG a good model??

2. The other external model that I am looking at is the HP 940E and it is 16X as is the LG.
Again I am wondering about being able to set it to DVD ROM for burning and again asking about needing special media for lightscribe.

I have been reading about lightscribe and wondering how complicated it is to do a title etc. and looked at the software Sure Thing and what bothers me the most is how long a process is it to do a title etc. burning on the opposite side of the disc?
Is it worth the time if it takes awhile. I spoke to a fella in the store where I was looking at the burner and he said that he heard that it took awhile to burn the image onto the disc.

I really would appreciate some experienced comments, thankyou and I apologize if this sounds like a mundane question however in the reading that I have done on google there is not that much on lightscribe; simply a general description of what the end result is and i really want to know how complex and time consuming it is.

Again thankyou for your time.

[DewAsmara]

Hi there,
I have that LG external DVD Writer, two actually but one is internal drive that attached to my computer in my home country. Yes it works fine, but for LightScrabe you need special DVD disc that LightScribe compatible. I never doing Lightscribe any disc before so cannot comment a lot. But I assure you it is a good DVD writer.

[Azash]

I've had 3 DVD burners so far, all external. The first was a Sony DRU-500(U?)L, which I recently traded off for a faster video card in one of my desktop PCs. The second, which was used in tandem with the Sony to transfer home video from DVD+RW DVD-VR written discs to make permanent copies on DVD+/-R media, was a GSA-5163D SuperMulti (pretty much everything but LightScribe capable, including IEEE-1394 & USB2 connectivity). I tended to use the Nero Express 6 (6.6.1.0?) for the task mentioned.

The most recent addition, mostly as a replacement to the now missing Sony and intended to allow me to go back to direct DVD+RW to DVD+/-R copies (vs. -to-hdd-then-to-DVD+/-R), is an LG GSA-E30L.

My experiences so far- first, dunno about the E10L you're considering, but the E30L lacks firewire capability (USB2 only), as well as even a basic power switch. Once plugged in it's on until you unplug it or kill the power strip's power. I like to turn off my drives if I shut down my PC so I usually end up unplugging the E30L (thankfully the power strip is next to my PC on the small cabinet next to my desk, within easy reach). A minor note, but one to keep in mind.

Prior to the E30L I had my burners connected using firewire. I installed the Nero Express 6 from the CD included with the E30L so that I could take advantage of the LightScribe support. Once I rebooted I realized that the 5163 was no longer showing up. After examining my hardware list, XP wasn't detecting it either. Short of moving the cable to a different firewire port on the motherboard's connector (previously was connected to an add-in 3 port PCI card), nothing would cause XP to "see" it. However I could take it to my daughter's PC and it showed up immediately (so not the drive). I've since determined that besides some fluke messing with my PCI card, the relatively long firewire cable may also have a short, and switched the 5163 to USB2 to match up with the E30L. I can't honestly say I believe the installation of the E30L and Nero were directly the cause of my problems (more likely I did as I was connecting the USB2 cable for the E30L to the back of my PC).

But I can say that I'm less than enthused with the experience I'm having with the slightly more recent release of Nero Express 6 that came with the new drive. The revision is 6.6.1.6 (yes, the latest available on Nero's site is 6.6.1.4!). It looks great, but not really different in any meaningful way over the one I had installed before, other than the addition of LightScribe label design & "printing" to the built in label tool.

I'd be okay with all that, since I used the previous version for all of my basic CD and DVD burning needs (minus the actual DVD menu / content mastering stuff). But since the installation of this version Nero no longer "sees" the content on my DVD+RW. Despite the fact that examining the disc (in either burner) through Windows Explorer clearly shows the DVD-VR (Video_TS, etc.) content, and the fact that it's actually playable on my PC using any of the various DVD player software. Attempting to do a disc copy from Nero now results in an error saying that I can't copy this disc to DVD, with the logs reading something about an empty disc. Further examination of the disc using Nero's Disc Info also says it's empty, though it does read the disc type information and capacity. I've been able to perform the actual copy using one of my other tools (one of the Sonic tools) though, so it's currently more of an annoyance than anything else.

On to the LightScribe functionality. I've only used it on one disc so far. The results are awesome, though I actually had to do 2 passes (each one increases the contrast by "re"printing exactly over top of the previous pass), even after installing the LightScribe contrast enhancement tool and enabling it (turning "best" / darkest mode even darker). And yes, it does take a long time to burn the image to the disc- almost 30 minutes per "print" cycle. So I spent roughly an hour for the single disc I've done so far. But I do think the results are worth the time, so long as you don't need to "label" too many discs in any given day. It could become seriously tedious if you've got more than 2 or 3 discs you want to do in the same period of time.

The drive itself has performed flawlessly, and awesomely for the few tasks I've asked of it. And compatibility of DVD+/-R media I've burned with it on my standalone players, DVD readers (in PCs), etc. has been top notch. Besides, that's normally more dependent on the burning software and media than the burner anyway. (Nero has a "DVD high compatibility mode" that ensures any DVD-targetted discs have at least 1GB of content written, though I don't know what it uses for filler if your own doesn't fit the bill. I always set that).

I highly recommend the drive (or just about any external LG), and hope my Nero issues stem from some weird installation faux pas rather than an actual bug in the software. I've got a tech support request in with Nero for my software problem (included the failed burn output log), so maybe I'll get resolution on that, if someone here doesn't read about it and post the fix first. :P

[Lenny_Nero]

LG make some of the best DVD writers.
I have a LG 4167 that can burn quality media better than any other drive I have ever used.