Please recommend a CD/DVD burner

[kjlama]

I am ready to upgrade cd/dvd player in my Dell PC, are there any brands which are better? Burner is a Phillips and works fine, but seem to have trouble reading discs from time to time on cd/dvd, and drawer wont open right any longer. So many brands now, it seems hard to choose.

[dansrfe]

LG has worked the best for me over the years.

[Blue_MiSfit]

I'd say its impossible to objectively say which brands are better than others when it comes to optical drives.

I'd get the cheapest one that has the features you want. They're so cheap nowadays it's not a huge loss if one breaks.

Derek

[Midzuki]

The LG, Pioneer and Samsung models are generally recommended, they have had a good reputation so far. :) But if you'd like a more-qualified opinion, there is a guy at Videohelp named budz, who appears to know "everything" about all types and brands of CD and DVD burners. It wouldn't hurt to send him a PM, I guess. :)

[mariush]

For years I only had LG drives - seems like they have the most compatibility with most discs. I'd go with Asus drives and Lite-On models, then Samsung and Pioneer, Plextor, whatever.

[Ghitulescu]

There's no definitive answer, as the best burner can be a baloney if no proper media is available. It depends on your media.

When a burner costs today some 20€, no manufacture will spend money on testing every medium on the market, so the winner is the drive with the most "compatible" list and/or with the most "adequate" default strategy.

PS: my experience with Philips optics is 100% negative (all drives died prematurely). I don't particularly like LGs too, however they flooded the market. Pioneer, Plextor (originals), Toshiba (not TSSD) and LiteOn (incl. OEMs) are ok.

[rjd0309]

I recently had to deal with dvd-burning issues, and I've found that Lite-On, LG, Samsung, and BenQ have good reputations as quality drives.

You'll definitely want a drive that can bitset the booktype of DVD+R discs to "DVD-ROM". This makes a DVD+R disc appear to be a DVD-ROM disc (same as store-bought commercial discs). This makes your discs compatible with the greatest number of players.

Those drives that are built with the Mediatek chipset, as opposed to the NEC chipset, can also have the capability of reporting on laser focus errors and tracking errors. In conjuction with a drive diagnostic tool such as Opti Drive Control, this can give you information regarding the quality of your burns.

(For example, I recently bought a Lite-On drive, model "iHAS324-09 A". The "A" suffix denotes the presence of the Mediatek chipset. This was on sale at my local Walmart -- can you believe it?!)

If you ever want to burn labels directly on LightScribe discs, you'll want to look for a drive that has LightScribe capability.

Also, some Lite-On drives have a "smart erase" feature, which can overwrite an already-burned disc so as to destroy the data beyond any hope of recovery, if data security is a concern.

[rjc7394]

I've used Samsung, Pioneer, Plextor and eventually ran into problems (ie. reading, burning) with all of them. I've had NEC for 2 years which has been 100% dependable. Never had a problem burning and I burn at least 25 DVD/CD a week. I would never buy anything else now. Got it at Newegg.