Now that the slew of DVD writers available on the market today are capable of writing at every conceivable dvd format, I've considered purchasing one for myself.

I would like to know what are the pros and cons of each brand/manufacturer.

Welcome to the forum. Your best bet is to read through the forums for a while on each manufacturers so you can see what different users have to say and what different burners do best. Everyone likes their own choice best and will tell you to buy what they bought so forming your own opinion is important. Right now there are only a few with problems, NEC is the worst, and Samsung has a few bugs, but others are pretty decent. My preference is the Pioneer 111.

Watch the postings now, others will jump in and defend those I don't like. That's just the way it is.

Thank you very much for the immediate response. I've heard great things about Pioneer, but the thing is.....It's not available on our country/locality (Only consumer brands like Samsung, Lite-on, BenQ, LG, Asus, Iomega, and Sony) so I only have fewer options as I would have liked.

LG would be my second choice based on burn quality. You should identify the media ID you will have to choose from as many times this determines which drive is best.

Again, thank you very much for the replies....

While I was at work, I'd realized that there are many facets that makes a good dvd writer....and I really need a dvd writer that's excellent at reading any/most types of cd/dvd media, and that mainly includes crap media/old burnt stuff. (You can tell that I'm far more into reading / ripping data because writing data can be rectified with good cd/dvd media, and there's no solution to difficulties in reading
discs unless I switch to a different drive).

I hope experts here could give me some suggested brands or models (/w all dvd write modes) that conforms to this criteria.

in the area of good readers, the best are BenQs from the 1620-1655 series and the Asus ROM drives, like the Model DVD-E616A3 . I have also found an occasional BenQ ROM drive with very good reading abilities.