hi there!

after reading the cdfreaks review i went and bought a pair of benq 1640's (black). i seem to be having serious problems reading dvds. it keeps speeding up and down all the time, and some dvds it just cannot copy files from. both benqs have the bslb firmware. any ideas on what i can do?

is it having problem reading pressed dvd discs or discs that you've burned from another drive? what brand of dvd media are you using? if you use good quality dvd media there shouldn't be problems with the files being read.

they are media written on another dvdr, but it's ridiculous even talking about this. what does a dvd-written-on-another-dvdr have to do with the benq being able to read it? i thought benq had good error control when reading media...

It has good error control but if the media is poor and damaged anyway then no reader will be able to read it. Its like trying to see out of a window covered in mud.

my sony dru500a (yeah, it's still alive) didnt have any trouble reading any scratched dvds so far (at least, as scratched as this dvd is....which is not that much). but other than not reading a few discs, what about this spinning up and down? any way to avoid it?

Not really, the drive is slowing down to read the damaged area and when it sences its past it then it speeds up again till the next area. If you have Nero installed you can use Nero Drivespeed to limit the reading speed of the drive to 2x.

Scratches are not the be all and end all of a DVD's errors, you also could have a problem with the die, improper writing quality from the orignal burner can also make a disc unreadable which can then be compounded by scratches etc. I have a few cheap DVD's that I wrote that are in pristeen condition, no scratches or marks but I cant read them on the BenQ because the discs outer edge was not recorded correctly and has to many burning errors on it. No error correction will fix that error so I have to re-copy them from the originals & re-shrink.