In Canada the "free media" is 1 free lightscribe cdr. Big fuckin' deal. The difference's I've noticed is that the Qtools has 8 tabs w/ options over the oems 4 tabs, they have different firmware, and the retail is 2.5X as expensive as the oem. It can't burn TYG02's for shit either, real ugly scan, shows their write speed as 2.4x, 4x, 8x, whereas my Plex & Nec both show 4x, 8x, 12x, 16x. I suspect this will be corrected with a firmware update.