I recently bought one of these drives (in Khypermedia clothing) and so far I'm quite happy with it. It burns DVDs very reliably and after purchasing the dual format firmware, I can even make a good DVD-R disc at 2.4x. I can live with that.

However, I'm having difficulty with CD-R media. My old CD-RW drive was an LG 48-24-48 and I found that this burner can almost make CDs on cardboard. OK, I exaggerate, but I never made a single coaster with it. It burned top quality discs and the cheapest CD-Rs I could find with equal ability. I never ran disc scans, but the burned discs always worked just fine in any player I could find. (I did find that a couple of my audio players didn't like when the buffer underrun protection kicked in, and this caused skips where the underrun was corrected. I just burn at 8x to solve this problem.)

The cheap discs I used to use with good luck with the LG burner aren't so good in the BenQ. It often gets write errors. When it does succeed, the discs do seem fine.

Was I lucky to have a CD-RW drive that would burn on almost anything?

And more importantly, what media do you guys find seems to work well in the DW800a? I'm tempted to get a supply of Taiyo Yuden discs (they aren't all that expensive in quantity) but I have to mail order them - I can't find them locally.

Thanks.

Jim

Fuji CD's that are "made in Japan" are TY. I would assume they would work very well. You also might try another burning program. What program do you use now?

I'm using Nero. I was using 5.5.x but have recently upgraded to 6.0.x demo. It seems to be working pretty well but it is equally fussy about the quality of the CD-R media in this BenQ drive as 5.5 was. 5.5 happily burned anything in my LG burner.

You know another alternative is get a CD-rw for $30 at newegg like a lite-on and save your DW800 for just DVD burning.

For use in computers (with computer data), I have never had a problem with the cheapest cd media I could find. However, for playback on settop players of VCD and SVCD, the quality of the blank discs does matter. I recently burnt a VCD image to 8 different discs from 8 different spindles, and tried them all on my settop player. The best results were from a spindle labeled "SPIN-X". Here is the Kprobe Info from these discs:

Disc Type CDR (A-)
Manufacturer CMC Magnetics Corporation
Material Phthalocyanine
Media ID 97:26:66
Length 79:59:73
Capacity 702.80 MB
Free Size 702.80 MB
Free Blocks 359846
Total Tracks -1
Maximum Read Speed 12x
Maximum Write Speed 48x
Current Write Speed 48x CLV
Write Speed Performance Descriptor 1 48x CLV
Write Speed Performance Descriptor 2 40x CLV
Write Speed Performance Descriptor 3 32x CLV
Write Speed Performance Descriptor 4 24x CLV
Write Speed Performance Descriptor 5 16x CLV
Write Speed Performance Descriptor 6 8x CLV

Good point. I still have my LG - so it will cost me nothing to keep.