i tested the drives with my not favorite but most used media RitekG04 printable, bought at cdrohlinge24.de.

this medias where burned @ 4x speed with the following configurations.

- Burning Software: Nero 6.3.1.17
- NEC 2500A F/W original NEC 1.07 FW; Booktype DVD-R
- NEC 2500A F/W Herrie´s 1.07v2b5; Booktype DVD-R
- BTC DVDRW 1108IM F/W B228; Booktype DVD-R
- BTC DVDRW 1108IM F/W B228; Booktype DVD-ROM (i was wondering that Nero is able to set the Booktype to ROM also on -R Medias)

-all medias where scanned with the 1108 IM and Nero CD/DVD Speed 3.10 (Diskquality Test and Transferrate)

-the complete Media Information
Region information: N/A not a DVD-VIDEO
Media code/Manufacturer ID: RITEKG04
Format Capacity: 3.43GB(3.69GB)
Book Type: DVD-ROM
Media Type: DVD-R
Media Id Code Speed: 4.0x 5540KBps
Write Strategy Speed: 4.0x 5540KBps
2x Speed OPC beta: 08
2x Speed OPC power: 12
2x Write Strategy field 1: 11 86 67 80
2x Write Strategy field 2: 88 80 00 00 00 00
4x Speed OPC beta: 05
4x Speed OPC power: 1B
4x Write Strategy field 1: 0E 10 08 09
4x Write Strategy field 2: 97 06 0D 0B
4x Write Strategy field 3: 00 00 00 00
4x Speed OPC beta multi-pulse: 04
4x Speed OPC power multi-pulse: 1D
4x Write Strategy field 4: 18 A8 88 85
4x Write Strategy field 5: 89 AC 88 80 00 00
4x Write Strategy field 6: 00 00 D0 00 00
Data area starting sector: 30000h
Data area end sector: 1B7A1Fh
Linear Density: 0.267um/bit
Track Density: 0.74um/track
Number of Layers:1

00 6C 00 00 01 40 C1 FD 9E D8 52 00 02 76 0E 14 .l...@....R..v..
88 9A 80 00 03 52 49 54 45 4B 47 00 04 30 34 00 .....RITEKG..04.
00 00 00 00 05 88 80 00 00 00 01 00 06 08 12 11 ................

See the results in the next postes.

Both NEC burned graphs are looking perfect.
The media burned with 1108 and dvd-rom booktype is the most bad, when you compare the results of both 1108 burned medias you can see that the pi errors are a little higher with the dvd-rom bitsetting, average is nearly the same, largest difference @ pi failures dvd rom burn max. 10, average app. 2 times higer.

Both NEC burnes are very good and @ pi failures much better than the BTC ones.

all burned medias are good readable, there are no significant differences between NEC and BTC.

Diskquality on BTC burned medias is not as good as NEC burned (PI errors much higher, PI failures app. 5 to 10 times higher, but on acceptable niveau).
Transferrate shows that all burned medias can be used without problems.

Here are some possible conclusions to this data:
1- The NEC has the best writing quality of any DVD drive.
2- Who cares what the scan looks like, as long as the disc reads ok. If you don't scan it you'll never know the difference.
3- NEC makes a better drive than BTC in terms of writing quality. (I doubt anyone can argue that point).
4- Ritek media is inexpensive, but not top quality.
5- BTC needs to work on their write strategies for some media.

Nice data, I'm just not sure what we should take away from your hard work.

Also, I wonder if the results would be any different if the discs were scanned with Kprobe on a LiteOn drive.