I recently purchased a BenQ 1655 and have been using it to back up my collection of DVDs. I started out burning on Verbatim 8x SL lightscribe discs and quality seems to good when using DVD Shrink.

The drive has the ability to use DL however and I am wondering if it is worth it to buy DL media to back up my DVDs. I know that lightscribe DL media wont be out for awhile so I will have to wait for it.

I really like the lightscribe feature as it really makes the discs looks nice, however, if the quality of DL is really superior to SL, I would consider going to DL non lightsribe media.

Any insight would be appreciated pretaining to "DL vs. SL."

Thanks in advance for your time.

You're comparing two entirely different things here. DL will allow you to copy your discs 1:1 with zero video quality degradation from the original disc, while using SL will obviously require compession of the original disc (unless the original is SL, which is uncommon anymore), resulting in lesser quality - how much the quality will suffer will vary based on what progam you compress the disc with, how much compression is needed, what extras you retain or remove from the original disc, your own quality standards, etc.

I don't believe Lightscribe exists for DL media YET, but I'm not sure, I don't use DL or Lightscribe. I think that there are printable DL discs, but I'm not sure about that either. If you're satisfied with the results you are getting from the compressed copies and Lightscribe is important to you, then keep on using what you are now. If you're willing to sacrifice Lightscribe and higher costs in return for perfect 1:1 copies, get DL.

If you want to use SL Lightscribe discs and get better quality, there are ways to improve the quality of your compressed copies. DVD Shrink does a great job for a transcoder, but you are probably not getting the most out of it. Properly making the most out of it by using Deep Analysis and AEC settings will result in even better conversions. Beyond DVD Shrink you can use DVD Rebuilder, it's also free and, if properly used, will always result in better conversions than ANY transcoder such as DVD Shrink or CloneDVD. It re-encodes instead of transcoding, you can use a free MPEG encoder such as HC Encoder with it. It's a slower process, but the results can be great when getting the best conversions possible, especially with longer discs with 2 1/2+ hours of content.

After reviewing your response (thanks for being so quick!) I guess I can refine my question a little further. The heart of my question is: how much degradation is there (approx) when using SL discs with the original being DL? Can a number be put to it? I try to be a perfectionist but I could stand 5% or so degradation.

Thanks in advance.

a double layer disc is DOUBLE the size of a single layer disc.

if you have a full DL original and are trying to compress it to a SL disc, you're looking at like 50% compression give or take.

you can remove extras and menus and unneeded audio tracks to reduce the compression, but sometimes even just the main movie will require a significant amount of compression.

a DL disc will always be able to copy a movie 1:1 (ie 0% compression)

finding a level that is acceptable to you is the key...

if you don't wan tto go the way of DL discs, but still want high quality backups there are a number of programs that allow you to split a movie onto 2 SL discs.

To add a little to that, every movie is going to be diffrent. Just because a disk is dual layer doesn't mean it is full to the maximum capacity, many are not. The bigger it is, the more compression it needs. Further, diffrent types of content and or diffrences in original quality can effect how well compression works too. Cartoons/animation actually show compression the worst. The size of your tv also makes a diffrence as to weather you will see a diffrence. You are more liklly to see it on a big screen tv, particularlly a high resolution one like a plasma tv. You kind of have to take it case by case and get a feel for what level of compression you are ok with.
Personally, viewing on a 27" tv and or a computer monitor, I have only ran across a couple of movies ever that have had noticable compression.