You can find it here: http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/214





Feel free to comment the review in this thread.

Great Review! I've been looking forward to seeing all the test results on how well the New NEC ND-3540A burner performs. Although I wanted to see how well it performed using mediocre DVD media, such as Ritek DVDs, it was still awesome none the less. Even though you’ve probably heard it before, I really appreciate the time and effort you put forth for making a review. Thanks for making an awesomely thorough review.

Excellent review Jan, very in depth and objective as always.

This is a great drive, and I’ve consistently been able to get great quality burns from it as well.
IMO a very worthy winner of the CD Freaks “Safe Buy” award.

Superb review Thanks for your efforts Jan - very comprehensive. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the release firmware for this drive gave such good quality burns, as early firmware is usually considered not so good. I was torn between choosing this drive and the Benq 1640 but after reading this review and seeing the wonderful work being done with the firmware by Liggy and Dee, I think I'll plump for the NEC now

Hello!

Great review of a great drive

Looks like the old NEC-problem (PIF-spikes when testing with Liteon-drives) is gone.

Now I´m waiting for the Benq 1640-review to compare

good review! I ordered one this week waiting for delivery and am now anticipating it even more. Have you by chance burned any of the TY 16X DVD-R's and scanned them? Thats the discs that I use in my pioneers.I ordered this drive because I was getting tired of waiting for the BenQ 1640 to be availible and I now dont regret it one bit.
Cheers

how well does this drive read scratched disc? And also does it support any kind of overburning?

Thanks

Excellent review!
I'm glad to see that you used some of my items from the NEC 3540A first look article.

I would like to note that I did not have the same Double Layer failure problems with my NEC 3540A on Ritek and RICOH DL media.
Although I did my burns using CD-DVD Speed .ISO write.

Great review. Just confirms the choice. Excellent all around unit for the dollar.

How big of a deal is the bitsetting problem if you want to use + media? Is there a list of DVD players that need this and is that likely to be fixed in a future firmware?

I don't know of a list with DVD-Players, but it is unlikely that NEC will change this. But there are NEC OEM drives with support for bitsetting on all kind of discs and your can also find some modified bitsetting firmwares

im pretty sure theres no list but if your DVD player isnt 5-6+ years old, you shouldnt have anything to worry about. ive tested + media with almost a dozen different DVD players and only 1 wouldnt play + media and that was a 6-7 year old Toshiba DVD player. That DVD player wouldnt even play CD-R's though, thats how old it was. At the time i had that DVD player, i didnt know about bitsetting so i didnt get a chance to try.

Thanks, my Panasonic DVD reads VCD CD-R and is about 3 years old. So it sounds ok.

I'm also interested how good it reads scratched discs. Is it better to wait for BenQ 1640 or to buy NEC 3540A?

Yeah I'm also deciding between this drive (which sounds very good) and the Plex 740/Benq 1640

Would be nice if NEC livened up the face a bit with a few logos. I don't know why this retail version doesn't have an NEC logo on it.

Oh please, no fancy logo's on the NEC face like BenQ

Really nice review and the drive performed impressive.

Nothing fancy, just an NEC logo and the dvd logos written in black would be nice! There's nothing on the face to suggest it's an NEC, alot like the OEM Pioneer drives.

Which d0rk actually maintains NEC's homepage? It says the drive were 4x dvd-r dl, whereas it is 6x

Haha, they're not always the swiftest at updating / catching typos are they?
But I know you love your 3540 anywayz
Most likely the initial spec for DVD-R DL was 4x and they didn't update it once it improved...

OK, bad homepage and good drive is a lot better than vice-versa

Hello,
how would you explain the much worse results with NEC 3540A on this site:
http://www.ixbt.com/optical/nec3540-test.shtml (excuse me, the site is in russian, but the graphs are relatively clear)
As I read the review by CDFreaks, my first wish was to run in the computer store und by the drive, but then I have found this. I am confused totally

Those were probably burned with one of the first firmwares. There have been a few revisions of 1.01 with 1.01e being the latest. Plus the excellent tweaks done by Liggy & Dee making media burn faster and better.

Thank you! So, I should just download the "Liggy & Dee NEC ND-3540 Modified Firmware V 1.W5" (that I found on CDFreaks) for the best burning quality? Ok, I haven't read the thread to the firmware in forum yet, my english is not so good