Dear all,

I'd like to post some comments from the manufacturer's point of view, if you don't mind.

Just because you don't see any good comments on the BTC DRW1004 doesn't mean that the drive is bad !

We have been selling hundreds of thousands of these drives over the last few months with low failure rates and good quality and all I can find on these chatrooms is negative comments.

On one hand understandable, because why would you turn to a chatroom if your drive is working fine.

On the other hand, these chatrooms give a very wrong impression on the quality of a product. The few negative messages that appear about a product are repeated by others a zillion times, thus creating the impression that the product is bad. The funny thing is that most of these users have never even bothered to contact us, the manufacturer, to help with their problems.

Yes, there have been some defective drives, which after a couple of times burning suddenly couldn't read any DVDs anymore. When you sell a few hundred thousand units, you'd expect some of them to come back defective. It's not realistic to expect to have a 0% failure rate, no matter who hard we try and hope.

And yes, it is a challenge for us to keep up with all the latest MID Codes which are entering the market every day.

But the overall defective rate of the DRW1004 is still very low, and all of these drives have been replaced by new ones, and we keep close contact with all the major media manufacturers on the market and make sure new firmwares are coming out regularly to enable users to use more and more media.

In general, I would say 99% of complaints are due to the use of incompatible media, which mostly can be solved by updating the firmware.

Currently the latest firmware for the DRW1004 is V0040, though we have a V0042 beta version available as well.

So please, all you users who have bought a DRW1004 and are experiencing problems, please check our website regularly for firmware updates and contact our technical support people for help first before starting to complain on chatrooms about the product.

I thank you for your attention.

Marco
BTC Europe Support

Hi Marco,

First of all, thank you very much for taking the time to give us your thoughts on a public board. We appreciate it a lot. You are right, a lot of negative comments on forums do not directly mean that a drive is bad, mainly it means that the drive is well sold, because we all know that a lot of problems excist between the user and the keyboard. However most people see a forum like ours to be value added support, they receive - in general - much faster replies and share the information with others.

There can be a number of reasons why users of this particulair drive head over to a forum like ours and discuss their problems instead of contacting the BTC support department. But this is of course not of our concern, our concern is that our visitors and guests are provided with the right information at the best possible response time.

In this case we would be willing to seek a solution with BTC and would invite you to actively participate on our website and to get more involvement of your support staff on the boards.

Of course negative comments should not and will not be deleted, but when you are more involved in the forums you will notice that you can respond faster and better to the problems and avoid misunderstandings that can be raised when users discuss the problems together.

On our side we will try to make sure that you will receive kind and respectfull replies and take care of users who are not able to communicate in such a way.

Regards,

Jan-Willem

CD Freaks Management

Thanks, Jan-Willem.

I will certainly take this chance to help all the readers of your board who have questions or problems with BTC products in general and the DRW1004 in particular (because it's our hottest product at this moment).

And I certainly welcome all constructive criticism that may help us make our company, products and services better and give me a chance to defend our company's point of view.

Our company is in this business for the long term, so it's in our interest to make sure the enduser's experience is satisfactory.


Marco
BTC Europe Support

Hi and welcome

I do not have any BTC drives due to limited availability in my area, but if I had a chance on reviewing one I would for sure do it.

This way we would have seen how the drive is from a reviewers point of view, and not only from unsatisfied end users

Maybe BTC is interested to get their drives reviewed by cdfreaks?
That should not be a problem with us..... I've contacted Jan-Willem, which is in the management team of this site to take this case further. He is on of the big Bosses around here so it's actually up to them to make any decisions.

But in case I sometime should get a BTC drive to review I hope I could get help from you if I have any questions while reviewing it.

Regards
OC-Freak
www.cdfreaks.com reviewer and forum administrator

Hi there Marco,

Although OC-Freak already slightly mentioned this, I still want to mention it once more. I know that here in the Netherlands, BTC drives are quite hard to find. Most people here even don't know BTC and there are very few shops selling it (no shop I know sells them, but I found some hardware retailers that sell BTC on the net).

As I know that BTC is one of the brands that don't ask high prices for their products, I think it could be quite a nice brand for the Dutch people (we are very greedy ) and I guess that goes for the rest of Europe as well.

Is there a certain reason why BTC is hardly known and sold here? If I knew more about your drives (and ofcourse, they are available), I might be interested...

Hi, Marco.

I'm also greatly interested in BTC DVD writers, especially the new DRW 1008IM 8x writer.

Is there any representative from BTC in Taiwan?

Well
I'd say that BTC has lots to do to build up its reputation including an increase in advertisements.
BTW: I have heard that BTC is the OEM of Sony DVD-ROM, isn't it?

Good luck

BTC manufactured the Sony DDU-1621, but not all Sony DVD-ROM's were made by BTC. Some were made by Lite-ON.

My opinion of BTC was built on my experiences with some of their older products (I found no need to give them another try yet after those) and on the many, many user experiences that I've read. Like any company, reputation is built on products, and if the products are improved, so will the reputation be improved. It does seem that they are getting better, and I really want to give BTC Europe some credit for their massive firmware offering which the other BTC sites don't offer.

Few people know what BTC is, so it would definately be wise to get a few drives out to reviewers.

Where, exactly, is this firmware "available"?

Agree
BTC is not widely known for its optical drives(even there are lots in store)
BENQ(also known as Acer) claim to be the top selling manufacture of optical drives in some area(which they did not metion ) but from my experience, their products are totally crap. Their online support team is just a group of idiots sitting in front of the monitor telling you to wait their COMING firmwares.
but still, lots of people get into buying their drives, why? you can see BENQ's advertisement everywhere on the internet & consumers assume that they are offering a better deal than other brand(I used to be fooled by them once)

Last year I bought a BTC CD-Writer (sold as Polaroid)
and I'm really happy with this drive

No writing or reading problems yet with this very quiet drive.
The media compatibility is very good!

I would not hesitate to buy a BTC product again......

Andy

Officially released firmwares for the DRW1004 are always available from our website at http://www.btceurope.nl/english/3-1-...d_dvd_dual.htm

Currently V0040 is the latest official release. Beta versions of new firmwares can be sent on request. Pls. send a mail to support@btceurope.nl

Furthermore, in order to make things clearer for everybody we offer a media compatibility list on our website at http://www.btceurope.nl/english/3-2-1MediaSupport.htm
(Please note that this list is being compiled at this moment, so might not be 100% complete yet.)

Regarding the reputation of BTC, BTC has been in the optical drive business for a long time, has seen lots of ups and downs (read: bad and good products) in the past and has significantly raised its level of quality (and scale of production) over the last few years, resulting in large contracts for some of the big(gest) OEMs in the world.

From a service point of view, we try to take customers and endusers serious and try to do our best in providing them with fast and good service. Though good service is something that every company claims to give, we deal with this service ourselves, unlike many other companies, who often outsource it to (dubious) 3rd parties.

Answer to Kenshin: please send me an e-mail at support@btceurope.nl with your contact information. If you're in Taiwan, then I'll have someone of our HQ contact you as soon as possible.


Marco
BTC Europe Support

@Marco BTC:

I think too the reputation of the BTC 1004IM is not fair.
But why i do´nt know. But i know a the proud user here
in this forum must tell the people in the other foren
that the BTC is a good deal (knock on wood )...

And i hope you could do this too, espacilly in foren in germany...
If we could tell this the ppl they´ll buy other burner...


Dickmann



P.S: Again i must tell you you make a really good job and i hope
BTC in Taiwan know that.
I´m sure if you would do this no´ne of the ppl would buy
the BTC1004IM.