CD Freaks brings us news from the Plextor stand at the Cebit exhibition : http://www.cdfreaks.com/news2.php3?ID=6823

Great news !

Now that should bring back some competition with LiteOn

According to this CDRinfo thread, Plextor, Yamaha or Teac are better than LiteOn for burning quality.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=9342

Yeah, there now seems to be a popular belief that Lite-on drives beat Plextor in every way as far as I've seen the only advantage of lite-on drives is that they are cheap, C2 performs badly & high speed burning seems to be a problem. Am I missing something?

You've been missing quite some. C2 accuracy on the latest LiteOn drives is near-perfect, and in that aspect they do better than Plextor. See http://www.cdspeed2000.com/go.php3?link=da...eerrortest.php3 - which doesn't yet include the 6th generation chipset drives, i.e. 48246S and 52246S. These do even better (see Writing Quality at cdrinfo.com).
Cheap they are, and at that price, for me having to burn at lower speeds is fine.

Why exactly do you have to burn at lower speed with a Lite-On?

And from what I remember of the cdrinfo.com writing quality article, the Teac drive they tested (the 40x model I think) had pretty bad jitter and made me doubt the writing quality of the Teac W524E.

I now use a Lite-On for various reasons.

-dave

I always thought Plextor with plextor tools always provide the best DAE quality..... seems i have mis something over the period i am not here.....

The Plextor vs. LiteOn quality issue is a very traditional subject of flamewars on CD-burning forums and has generally been beaten to death many times before.

Both manufacturers make very good drives. LiteOn drives offer very good C2 accuracy and when using "good" media, gives excellent results.

This is easy to verify using either WSES or Disk Doctor. My LTR-48246S combined with TY media gives very, very good C1 error rates (equal or better than Plextor burns) and the discs are extremely compatible. The speed issue is completely dependent on media quality, certain media handles 48x burning speed extremely well. At 24x, practically any media gives excellent results. Remember that the time difference between 48x CAV and 24x P-CAV is about 50 seconds per disc.

Actually I was thinking about price rather than burning quality - but in quality and reliability, even though I liked Plextor a lot, it looks like they aren't as exceptional as they used to be.

My friend bought a 24X plextor burner and it broke twice in a row.. he exchanged it each time. It just doesn't fit, I don't know.
The Plextor I have is a 4X SCSI one, which had never let me down

In my opinion, LiteOn's strength is: they are "good enough" in writing quality (some even say great - may vary depending on the media), and dirt-cheap.



westgroveg... I didn't talk about quality at all ! I just said that Liteon has been bringing tough competition (in prices mostly) to Plextor and Yamaha, that's all.

Yamaha didn't give up CD-RW making for nothing.

Besides, I wouldn't mind paying $40 more for a LiteOn burner, to remove all those plastic parts which will break sooner or later.
Are the Plextors made of plastic too ? I hope not.