http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/11408

are there any advantages with sony chipsets? are they much cheaper than mediatek ones?

mtkflash won't recover dead drives then....!

I don't hope that they have a super quality.
How boring is life without omnipatcher?

;-)

@code65536
how much will omnipatcher be affected by this change? is it possible that it cannot work anymore?

I think it will affect only certain aspects like recovery and crossflashing, but media swaps and certain other functions should be unaffected.

This is the perfect example of companies cutting corners - in order to remain competitive and sell at a good price, companies opt to use lesser quality products. On the other hand, the MT has some limitations and issues when it comes to high speed burning.... I just don't think Sony is the right choice.

New chipset, I would think the firmware will change drastically.

Agree.

Pure speculation. The firmware could be completely different, thus it could take a completely fresh reverse-engineering for these things. But speculating about it is pointless until the firmware actually exists. Sony has taken a strong anti-flashing and modding position in the past. Don't be surprised to see more of that. PI/PIE reporting could also be affected. You might want to grab a new 1633 and stick it on the shelf just in case.

As to Sony, there was never any option here, as they own LiteOn. Whether the hardware is better, worse, or the same, it's still cheaper. It's not a question of wanting to cut corners, they have to if they intend to stay in business at current drive prices.

Sounds like having a lot of fun again

Maybe they will just finally produce a drive that gives good -R and +R burns and does not need to be hacked to provide the features the users want. Somebody wake me up, I'm dreaming again... They can change the chipset but it's still a LiteOn designed by the same engineers, built in the same factories, and the quality control is the same. In the end you will get a new model that works, but does not work well..IMHO

Sorry but I've heard this one too many times - I'm sure most people have lost faith in LITEON - as each new drive coming out gets worse and worse. The way LITEON is heading I doubt that any of their new drives will provide equal burning quality to other burners - This sony / Liteon thing is a BIG mistake. The 1633 is the end of the line for me - If future drives from LITEON are found to be mediocre in burn quality then I will permanently switch to another brand.

LITEON used to be my favourite for burning CD-Rs.......Now with the new drives, CD-R writing quality is HORRIBLE on *ALL* media.

I have heard others say BenQ/Philip Chipset burn better, cheaper & faster than
LiteOn...... Also, Too many model but only a small differences will confuse
& piss customer as Well.

Never heard of a Sony chipset before... I mean, there were original SONY CD-RW drives that were rebadged by others (mainly HP), but then all Sony's drives have been rebrands for ages.

sony chipset is used for example in a Artec/ultima DHI-G40.

and the last time I buy a Liteon. Unless it upholds the tradition of kprobing, >=2 sheep burning, and great error correction.

You know what - I think that my next burner will be a Plextor. If LITEON decides to play dirty games with the modding community by putting everything we all f****** worked hard for by releasing drives with an even CRAPPIER chipset that disables and renders all the mods and kprobes USELESS then LITEON will lose LOTS of customers, including me. I will go for Plextor next time. This is LITEON's way of saying "we're on to you customers..... now we make drive with not capable of krpobe so customer not know drive be poor burn quality......." I can picture the engineers laughing their guts out saying "we're on to you suckaz!"





















,,,,, (btw was just kidding )

But seriously here, I would really be disappointed if we lose KPROBE functionality as well as media swap and other tools, which I believe is why most people have gotten their LITEON in the first place.

kprobe is made by Karr Wang from liteons tech support. i think there will be a new version to support this new drive-generation. bitsetting will still be there and if omnipatcher does not work anymore, there surely will be another great tool with the same functionality.

I just heard a rumor that the 1635S drive has a MTK chipset.

16x-8x-8x / 16x-6x-4x

So this article may be a bit premature.

Let's wait until they release first one. Maybe it will be still "LiteOn", maybe better, maybe worse. If they exclude good features we have now, I will switch to Plextor.