I need help finding a good DVD burner to put into production here at my work. We are running the burners in autoloaders (robotics) that loads the cds via an arm that senses where to place the CD via laser lens which sees the open CD Tray, the problem with this is the lens has a hard time seeing most black CD trays as we have been using Plextor 760A's it isnt always seeing the trays and sometimes damaging them by slamming into the trays breaking the tray rendering it unable to open.

In addition to this the drive will be placed into an environment where it is burning around 300 DVDs/ CD's a day AT LEAST, so quality is key here.

We have been unsatisfied with Plextor 760's and are looking for a new drive, but are having a hard time finding a white tray. Anyone have any suggestions?

Hmmm, unless there are some industrial use DVD writers being manufactured by some companies, your choices are limited to what is available to the consumer market. Most current writers should still be available in beige with a beige tray, if that is suitable as white is quite rare.

For consumer brands, I suggest looking at LG/Samsung/Pioneer writers.

Additional thing to check would be to look at the tray pattern (in case the sensor is looking at a place that might be at or near an opening on other trays) and sturdiness (most drives now have a lightweight tray, which do not handle unintended robot impacts well).

Also keep in mind that most contemporary consumer drives do not extend the tray as far as older drives. In fact, I've read that duplicator manufacturers sometimes request special firmware that extends the tray out a bit farther (by ignoring the "stop" sensor and extending to the end of the track? not sure how that works.).

In my work with some Mediatechnics changers, I had to perform two physical modifications to some drives to get things working:

a) Removed the faceplate, since the tray wouldn't extend far enough past it to prevent the discs from clipping it during put/get.

b) dremel out the drive mounting slots in the duplicator a few more mm toward the front, as the new drives are both substantially less deep and appear to be manufactured for flush mounting on smaller machines (e.g. machines that don't have a huge front plastic branding monstrosity on the front). Actually, if replacing a stack it's worth checking to see if the vertical mounts themselves can be moved forward a bit so that the entire stack mounting assembly can be brought forward a bit. Instead of 8-24 bits of dremel work, you just have 4.

-brendan

300 DVDs in one DVD burner is almost.... impossible. Infact, it is totally impossible in a 24 hour period for one writer, unless you have one of those stacking units that burns 8 or so DVDs in one go. Even writing this many CD-R would be hard and writing CD-Rs too fast will reduce the quality, especially if it's an audio cd.

18x writer = just over 5 mins to burn 1 disc
5 minutes x 300 = 1500 minutes
1500 divide by 60 minutes per hour = 25 hours to write 300 DVDs... AT LEAST.

Also doing this will pretty much wreck a DVD writer relatively quickly. Hiring a professional stamper/getting a company with one to make your discs would be way easier and faster not to mention, more professional by far.

LGs are good at writing CD-Rs though, so if you really want a decent DVD recorder and a good CD-R burner, a recent LG should do the trick.