Grain

I meant that "perhaps" they did include proper DL firmware on the retail version and just didn't do it on the oem firmware. That may be answered somewhere though...

I wonder if there's a difference in DL burning between the OEM & retail firmware? Don't really feel like sacrificing a disc to find out though, may just wait for an update.

I see on LUK's review of TYG02 media that his 1640 show's the same speeds as the 1655, so perhaps I need to burn some more and the quality will improve (crossing fingers).

Yeah, it makes a rather nasty noise as the disc comes to a grinding stop. I tried an exorcism, but as I'm not Catholic I just pissed it off. After the monitor stopped spinning, and the horrible thing quit stabbing itself in a PCI slot, I gave up.

I have a Pioneer 107 ROM in my old machine, it's starting to spit out the tray with the disc still spinning at full rpm though, which tends to scratch them up pretty bad I use it just rarely enough to forget and still use it now and then, I guess it's time to remove it and use it for a door stop.

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.

What make & model are your dvd players?

I'm quite sure Movie Junkie is talking about bitsetting your burner not a standalone player. Did you change the booktype to DVD-Rom?

I assume your a voting shareholder of Verbs by now? Sorry about the luck, I would guess they'll replace this one also.

I luckily missed out on having RITEKG05 problems. After I noticed that the very first spindle of DVD's I bot were shitting the bed after only 3 months (the hugely famous brand name of e3Works, media id: 001-00 ), I switched almost exclusively to Taiyo Yuden (also some Verbs & Ricohjpn), for several reason's, one of which was the LG 4120 burner I was using at the time didn't like Ritek(lucky break). I've bot some spindles of RITEKG05's over the past year or so, but haven't used them for any personal archiving other than the odd 1 here & there. Have an old spindle of BenQ 4X +R(DAXON) that actually scan quite nicely even after a couple years. Anyway, I know the pain of having achives fail .

now that's a ghost I have been chasing for over 3 months And what conclusion did you arrive at?

I've had much better scans w/ TYG02's burned at 8X over 12 or 16X, doesn't matter if Plex716 or NEC3520, haven't tried the BenQ1655 yet. TYG03's burned at 16X don't scan as nice as TYG02's at 8X, but they're better than TYG02's at 16X, and there was some improvement the more I burned, learning firmware?

Happy B Day!

Noticed in the Qtools that came w/ the 1655 that you can change the booktype of any +r/rw/dl media, even to dvd-r if you so wish, although that option may have been possible on older Benq's too. Any advantage/disadvantage to that over changing it to dvd-rom?

What do you use for coasters? I've got enough to last 6 lifetimes betweeen testers and various other "experiments"

Off topic, but that's never stopped me before. Found a Mad Kats cd buffer in a bargain bin for $4 over the holidays. Works excellent on duffed discs, buffs out the scratches and then re-polishes. Looks like a heavy duty cd walkman w/ buffing/polishing heads(2X) instead of the laser pickup. Fixed a fooked XBox game and a purchased ex-rental, w/ excellent results.

Thanks Doin' good LFC, you have a PM.

EDIT

Try opening it in Shrink, File> Open Disc Image or something close to that, and if it does open you can create a new ISO that should work. It certainly appears that there's something funny with the ISO. The fact that Nero does work is strange, but Nero is strange at the best of times.

I'd try returning them either way. Those are poor discs by almost everyones standard, and the sooner Ritek catches on that people won't pay good money for shite the better.

I shouldn't hold his entrepreneurial success against him, but I do. Rich bastard.

Enjoying the topics in that section so far, keep them coming! I see the newer NEC drives still occasionally show "steps" in their PIE scans, caused as they ramp up the speed when burning I believe. My old 3520 does this too, but still good scans, NEC's are great burner's IMO. The Plextor 716's 8mb buffer is part of why it's such an excellent all around burner IMO, and I can't understand why the industry seems to be stuck on 2mb. Unfortunately the newer Plex's are also 2mb, hopefully the new 760 is back to 8mb.