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Old 2005-08-06, 02:14 PM
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guygee guygee is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Astro Intergalactic Infinity
Re: Dual Layer DVD Burner?

I've been a loyal Plextor fan for many years, and I bought the Plextor PX-716A, but when I tried to flash the bios something went wrong, and now I get the dreaded "double flashing amber light". I went through the whole troubleshooting procedure on the Plextor website, but to no avail. I have to RMA it. In the meantime, I needed a DVD drive, and I went with the Sony DRU-800A (which is really just a rebranded LiteOn 1693S). Both of these drives have Dual Layer capability, whcih I do not plan to use since I want downward compatability. I should add that the Plextor is rated 8x DVD+R write, but it only seemed reliable up to 6x (this could have been the media, though) while the Sony easily writes 16x, even with system load like ABC running.

Plextor may produce a higher quality product with respect to jitter and other technical specs, but there is also the issue of system interoperability. I notice that Plextor does not appear in the list of manufacturers when you try to add hardware to Windows XP. The last Plextor drive I bought, a year or two ago, was the PX-708UF external, and I can't get Windows to recognize it anymore. I don't know, maybe it is fried, but it really wasn't used all that much.

Then there was the tiff over Plextor lawyers shutting down the free source PxScan and PxView projects, just so they could try and make money on their PlexTools Professional Software ( you can read all about this incident here:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?s...139203&tid=185 )
Hardware vendors suddenly trying to generate revenues from software products is usually a bad sign (e.g. SGI). I have to wonder if Plextor is slipping a bit. Any informed comments welcome.
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