Don't be too quick to RMA your TAL#0000 for a TLA#0101 unless it is obviously malfunctioning. The assumption that the TLA#0101 will be better may not be true.

Here are some scans from my original TLA#0000 and the replacement TLA#0101 using Nero CD-DVD speed 3.55, Plex Tools 2.18 and YUDEN000 T02 (Fuji 8X) written at 16X. I took the time to read the scans on both the TAL#0000 and TLA#0101 drives and found the reads to be the same. It was the writes that were different. Since I still have both drives I will attempt to RMA the TLA#0101 for another drive.

Graphic #1 - Data Disk from TLA#0000
Graphic #2 - Data Disk from TLA#0101
Graphic #3 - PI/PO scans from TLA#0000
Graphic #4 - PI/PO scans from TLA#0101

That's really discouraging. I RMA'd my TLA#0000 because it turned out scans like this TY02 @ 16x. I hope the new one performs acceptably.

Looks like it's hit and miss, regardless of the TLA#. I've apparently got a "good" TLA#0101 unit, but I haven't spotted another unit on the forum that matches it, so it looks like some units just have better hardware than others--maybe a production problem, maybe an engineering problem (I tend to think it's both, but more of the latter).

Honestly I think that Plextor's quality control is simply not what it used to be. You'll probably get good or bad units for every TLA.

Sounds like the PX-712A situation, only worse. There are at least some guys that got 712As that produced superb results (unfortunately, I'm not one of them).

But to reckognize a problem is the first step to solve it. At least they have noticed that there is something wrong with their 716 drives. Wtih 712 they always blamed the users (f. e. media from recommended list, wrong drivers, old software, PSU, etc.).

My experience with my 712A TLA#0000, now 0005, seems to confirm this. My drive conforms to what I see from the best results posted here. I have since installed three TLA#01XX units for clients, and all were slightly inferior in some minor way. In particular, when visually inspecting the burn, one could see two narrow bands of slight "pulsation," slight darkening at 3 places per revolution for the inner band and four places pre rev for the outer. Nothing that causes error, you understand, but a symptom, I believe, of a resonance in the physical assembly that affected the burn intensity or focus. My TLA#0000 has none of this.

A revision to the Transit-Laser Assembly might be for reasons that have nothing to do with quality improvement, as a firmware revision tends to indicate. Could be they changed vendors for a critical part, stopped hand-tweaking the first manufacturing batch, or added a drop of glue somewhere -- who knows? A hardware revision may be to reduce costs now that manufacturing is humming along.

So a belief in the superiority of a "later" hardware revision is unsubstantiated, unless Plextor has something definitve to say about it (very unlikely!).