ARe there any problems with the drive? Is it as good as LG Electronics DVD+RW/-RW Mulitformat Drive, Model GSA-4040BI? How is it in error handling? Can it read scratched DVD's? How is the compatibility with regualr players

For the moment stay away!!!
The +R/+RW DVD's it burns are not readable by any consumer DVD players I have tried. It's has a bitsetting problem, read the tread http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?threadid=79700
If they don't fix it forget it.

tkam111
what a lot of rubish i had problems finding media for the drive that would burn at right speed but that lasted for only a few days once i found right media ive been over the moon since and when i say right media all i mean is media that will burn at the speed stated on the disk even these disks worked in all 3 players i have here there is no problem i can see of players being able to read disks make with a 811s. bittsetting is for making older players read the disks thats all and if u do have one of theses player then you will prob find that all dvd writers cant make a disk for the player without bittsetting

Howdy!

With firmware hs0e, the drive definitely rocks - at least in my case. It burns even cheap Princo 4x DVD-Rs flawlessly and the writing quality is amazing. The writing quality is even better than my Teac DV-W 50D (flashed to Pioneer 106) AND NEC 1300A (I owned these drives so I can compare). Have a look at the attached screenshot (speed: beginning 6.54x; end 15.82x; average 11.84x) . The disc which was benchmarked here is a Platinum 4x DVD+R (Ricoh media code; written @4x) written with the LDW-811S (firmware hs0e). You see that the reading performance of this disc is simply perfect.

On the other hand, the others are right: Bitsetting is an important feature which currently is not supported by all LiteOn burners. But there is only one dual format drive which supports it: BTC 1004, and the bitsetting firmware is only at a beta stage.

I am quite optimistic that bitsetting will be added by LiteOn since the demand is high and LiteOn's firmware support is not bad: When many users complained about writing quality and XBox compatibility, they also fixed it.