Hello!
I am not sure which DVD Burner I should buy. I hope you can give me an advice. It should have a very good write quality, bitsetting would be fine too and it should be a good scanner to make quality scans of my DVD+/-R. First I bought a LiteOn LH18 but it was damaged and I heard that there are some more crappy burners of them circulating. So I don't want to buy one of them again. I hope there are some alternatives for the LiteOn.

Check the Benq forum. From what I've read they are good scanners and good writers, and as of 1/23/07 both the 1620 and 1650 were still available from ZipZoomFly.

In Germany no Benqs are available anymore.
Are LiteOn and Benqs the only burners who are good scanners?

That's what I conclude based on reading the different forums. I buy burners and other hardware only if the product has at least a 4 out of 5 star rating by customers. You might try a LiteOn SHW-160P6S or SHM-165P6S which have 4 star ratings at NewEgg if you wanted to use the same criteria. BTW your LiteOn LH18 has only a 3 star rating by NewEgg customers, and I agree whith your decision on it based on that rating. You may know some CompUSA, some Sony, and some Phillips burners are rebadged Benq burners if you wanted to try to find one of those. Good luck.

I would rate Plextor drives as better scanners, but they are in my opinion to slow to be used for the daily scans, since they scan at 2x and require separate scans for PIE, PIF and jitter.

Hmm...you can almost only get these LH18 and LH20 drives, LiteOn SHW-160P6S or SHM-165P6S nearly aren't available anymore.
But I can get the LiteOn DW1650, which should be the same burner as Benq DW1650 I think. It only cost 29€. Unfortunately I cannot find any reviews or scan results. Another possibility would be to wait for the Pioneer 112 in the hope that it is a better scanner than the Pio 111. Does anyone know something about it?

Read post #501 at http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread....21#post1675957
that says LiteOn DW1650 is really Benq 1650 plus post #505 states he can get 10 Benqs right now in Germany. You might PM the post #505 member if you don't find them near you.

So Benqs are as good in scanning as LiteOns? I always heard that they are not so good.
Maybe I am waiting till the Pio 112 is released and then I decide whether I buy a DW1650 or the Pio.

Unless some significant improvements are made, the Pio 112 may not be a good scanner since the Pio 111 is known not to be a good scanner. LiteOn seems to be used for scanning in many reviews of other burners' performance, but I've seen many posts by Benq users with very good scanning results. For me personally I chose the Pio 111 and cross flashed to 111L to gain bitsetting because the Pio 111 is best overall in reviews for burn quality and reading ratings IMO although it's not a good scanner; however, I'd choose either LiteOn or Benq if I were more concerned with good scanning.

If you have a good burner that burns quality disc why bother to have a good scanner to scan for such quality burned disc ?

Only to make sure that I don't buy fake Verbatim DVD+Rs.

Completely agree with Castros which is why I chose the Pio 111 myself. As for buying fake Verbatim how would you know until after you get and try them, and wouldn't DVDInfoPro or DVDIdentifier tell that even before trying them?

You can also fake the mediacode and then you think that you have real Verbatims.
But I decided myself for a LiteOn DW1650. I hope it is as good as the Benq version.

I just saw that here at cdfreaks reviews the DVD burn quality of the LiteOn BD Drive has been scanned with an Optiarc AD-7173A. Means of course: With an NEC chip! I thought that NEC drives are seen as not reliable scanners by everyone here. Is the 7173 a different story? If it is, why?

The Transfer Rate Tests in that review were performed on an Optiarc AD-7173A, but the Quality Scans were not.

When the term "unreliable scanner" is used on these forums, people are referring to using the drives to perform Quality Scans, i.e. PIE/PIF or C1/C2.

All drives are equally reliable for performing Transfer Rate Tests, but some drives are more useful than others because they tend to show problems that are not detected by other less picky drives. NEC and Optiarc drives are usful for this purpose because they aren't the best readers, so if you get a perfect TRT in one of those drives, there's a very good chance that the disc is also readable in other drives.

IF OTOH you use a very strong reader such as a LiteOn drive for performing the Transfer Rate Tests, you could easily have a perfectly smooth TRT and the disc could still be unreadable in many other drives.

I haven't seen it . I must be blind or something.

Many thanks for explaining, DrageMester. I know all that, I just forgot to look for seperate drives for the two kinds of tests. Sorry again...