I've been waiting patiently for Plextor's PX-16A to become available from the competitively priced dealers such as Newegg, but it's still not available except from a few places. I have always favored Plextor drives, and have felt that the price difference is generally worth it, especially with the availability of Plextools.

However, growing tired of waiting, and I need to order a few other peripherals now anyway, I couldn't help but notice the positive reviews and much lower prices of some several other burners. The only problem is, the reviews I've read tend to be quite general in nature and don't discuss DAE quality.

One drive that has received a lot of attention is the NEC 16X Double Layer DVD±RW Drive, Model ND-3500A
And at just under $70, the price is about *half* that of the new Plextor burner. Does anyone have any links to DAE quality tests that compare the relatively new DVD burners? If anyone would care to give their opinion on the best DL Burners available, I would appreciate it. And yes, I know that recording on DL discs is not really a feasible option right now! :-)

For a detailed review of the NEC check here.

And you definitely will need to wait awhile for the PX-716A. That's what I'm hoping to get but it currently has hardware problems and Plextor is supposed to be working on a revised hardware version. The problems apparently are not fully correctable through a firmware update though Plextor is still dumping the bad units on the US market (but not the European and Asian markets).

After an exhaustive search through all the information I could find on the currently available DL burners, I wasn't very impressed by the CD error correction results of any of the models. However, the tests I've seen were mostly limited to the ones at cdrinfo.com. Based on a comparison of their results, it looked like the BenQ DW1620A faired pretty well in that regard, but the lack of C2 error reporting makes it a non-option. If I had to choose a model right now, I'd probably get the LiteON SOHW-1633S, mainly because of the variety of useful tools such as Kprobe available for it, as well as LiteOn's good history. OTOH, its dual layer recording speed is only 2.4x, so I may hold out and wait to see what becomes of the Plextor mess...

The BenQ 1620 would be my recommendation ... no C2, but it doesn't cache during DAE so EAC will be speedy enough (around 11x average in secure mode).

Additionally, the 1620 is very tolerant towards low-level disc errors - it is believed to be an exceptional reader. And with Nero CD/DVD Speed or BenQ's new Q-Tool, you can perform PI/PO, FE/TE & Jitter checking.

Just do yourself a favour and do not get yourself a LiteOn DVD writer ... they may be good readers, but regarding their main task (writing DVD's), their writing quality is sub-standard IMO.

I think you are right about the LiteOn drivers. I would probably buy the PX-12A instead of the current 2.4x DL burners though, since I can't really see myself doing burns that take over 45 minutes, and who knows when the media prices will come down. Most likely I will just hold off for the PX-16A. I wish there were more useful reviews on DVD burners though. The problem with the reviews at cdrinfo.com is that they only perform one set of tests with one drive, which does not provide results of statistical significance.