I just bought a new Benq DW1655 from meritline. Based on reviews from CDRinfo, the drive looked like it had great burn quality, especially with DVD+R TY media. I just got the drive and tested it with the same TY media used in the review, and I got pretty bad results. I've been using Nero's disk quality tool to check the burn quality. The first disk I burned had 0% quality due to a couple very high PI failures. I figured I'd try again and the second one was better... all the way up to 43% quality. I also tried Verbatim DVD-R media and got a 15% quality score.

I included the graphs from a couple of the burns. So far I'm pretty dissapointed. My computer is plenty fast (P4 3.2 Ghz). I checked the Benq support site and apparently I have the latest firmware. Let me know what you guys think.

Thanks! :)

An added note... I just upgraded to Nero 7 and tried again.

I burned a TY DVD+R at 8x and got the first graph below.

(in reply to freedomainlist)

And I tried one more time... same data, same media... but this time at 4x. It actually got much worse!

(in reply to freedomainlist)

One more graph... this one I read back with the burner instead of my dvd rom drive. Maybe I just have a lowsey dvd reader. :)

(in reply to freedomainlist)

Well, i dont want to make you feel sad but it might be that your overall pc configuration is not ideal for burning media.
One half is that i really trust these cdrinfo guys and other half is that i had a talk few months ago with a specialist and she was trying to explain me that she assignes specific irqs to her devices or somethign like that, i am not sure i understood her very well. What i know is that if you want to burn quality media your pc should be configured by a specialist.

(in reply to freedomainlist)

That does sounds quite possible. My main concern is if I can trust my backups or not. If I am backing up important data, I want to know it'll be there if I need it. Hopefully it is working "good enough" to be a reliable backup method.

(in reply to freedomainlist)

i have burned some decades of cd and dvd media. I still have CDR media that i burned more than 5years ago and still work perfect. I had some bad time with DVD-R but i think the problem was the crappy media. So i experience some media that were not readable by some readers while others, LiteOn, could read them with no problem. I am also lucky enough to own a panasonic dvd-ram. So when i try to read dvd that are crappy and i get error reading message i just put it in dvd-ram and works perfect, dont ask me why, i dont know
The truth is that i have discs that i cannot read after years even when i try to read them from the writer that i burnt them

(in reply to freedomainlist)

Hi friend! The problem here is that you scan the same disc with different drives, hence you can expect different results... However if the disc's quality was OK the disc should give overall low error rates at both drives. LiteON DVD-ROM are not generally suggested for PI/PIF scanning, use a LiteON DVDRW for more reliable results

(in reply to adiadidas)

Yes, I agree with alexmacris, the problem is not your burner but the scanner you used. The disc (YUDEN000T02) scanned by the BenQ above is an excellent burn.

If you burn only with your BenQ, you can perform reliable scans with  the BenQ too. But prefer to scan with a Plextor or a Lite-On DVDRW drive if you burn with another drive than your BenQ.

(in reply to alexmacris)

You can use MCC004 for 1655

(in reply to Slywall)