i know most people don't use it for cd burning, but is benq good for burning cd-rs or should i use a regular cd burner for that?

It's only a one sheep, so if you're interested in copying game protection there's probably better. I thought I did a kprobe of errors and it was on par with my lite-on for cd-r quality.

I'd always recommend a regular cd-burner for cd-burning. Any DVD-/+RW drive will not have the supported media list that a regular cd-burner will therefore you are stuck with using the top quality name brand only media like Fuji, Taiyo Yuden, etc and DVD-Burners do not always do as good of a job as a cd-burner in general burning of CD-R's. The only DVD-Burner that I thought was cool as a CD-Burner was the Optorites with the HD-Burn technology, only problem is those 1.4 gigabyte discs could only be read back in the Optorite which stinks.

My recommendation is have the DVD-Burner for just that, burning DVD's. Once you have that then I'd recommend a CD-RW/DVD Combo for ripping and cd-burning purposes. The Lite-On drives are good for this and I always will recommend my Samsung TS-H492A although when it comes to copy protections I don't know how my Samsung fairs but that is not what I use it for.

I use my several DVD burners for burning CD's and have never had a problem. I don't copy copy protected disks so that might be the reason. If I have a CD Burner available I will definitely use it first as they are tipically faster, but that is the only reason.

I own a liteon 1633S that does axactly the same job as my late mitsumi cd burner. Even with copying game protections. But my BenQ is not very good at that.
I use to think like Braxas until my mitsumi died. I don't plan on bying an other cd writer.

It is rates as a one sheep recorder in one review, but be warned, many many people have tried to reproduce those results and have failed. Myself included. I cannot get the drive to behave as a one sheep drive - for me, it behaves as a no sheep drive.

Also, the drive has problems writing 4x CD-RW media.

Besides that, I have little issue with the drive and CD burning. Just don't expect to use it to burn game copies.

useless for game copying, amazing for music cd-r. I have Pioneer, Nec, and Benq. Benq blows the competition away in this department. Make sure Benq f/w is b7t9(solid).

And how do you compared one burner to the next when he comes to music cd-r?

The Plextor Premium seems to have a following for CD-R/RW.

Well if your talking in terms of media support, i'm not impressed with the BENQ's burn quality, have some old Doremi media (Cyanine dye) which my older Pioneer 106 burns with very good results (no C2) while the BENQ gives a lot of C1/C2 errors in the last 100 megs of the disc.

In fact the Pioneer 106 is probably a better CD burner in terms of media support than my 52x Lite-On

My 1620 consistantly beats my LiteOn (52327s) in burn quality for cdr.

One issue I've found with the DW1620 is even with the latest B7V9 firmware, all the high speed CD-RW discs I've tested on it burn at 4x instead of the 10x or 12x they support. Pretty lame to have these kind of basic media problems this far down the line in firmware. At least the burn quality is nice, but it had better be at that lame performance level. I've confirmed this with both CMC and Verbatim high speed CD-RW media. Strangely enough, it burns 32x media which really doesn't even need to be supported, but it burns them at 16x with an ugly C1 index albeit with no C2 errors.

I have had no problems using DVD burners as CD burners.

Much fewer problems then I had with my liteon CD burner (LTD-52327S)

On the benq DW1620:

I threw a CD-RW (10x Ricoh, 650meg, used a few times, about 3 years old) into the drive, and it reburnt quite well at full 10 speed. 4.73 average C1, 27 max, no C2 errors.

Seems to burn that CD-RW quite well

rugger,

Which firmware did you do that burn with?

Firmware B7V9. I am currently testing out an even older 4x, 700meg prodisk CD-RW. Then I will test out a Verbatim 24x 650meg CD-RW.

I threw another disk in .... a very old Datastream CD-RW (4x Prodisk, 700meg, used half a dozen times, even older (at least 5 years is a good guess)). It is fairly dirty and has many very light scratches.

I got very high C1 error rates, but no c2 errors, and good reading graphs on both my Liteon 166s and Benq drives.

All, in all, not a shocking burn for such an old disk.

Verbatim 650meg CD-RW ... 24speed. Never been used, but has sit in a paper disk case for ages, so has very minor damage from that.

The benq burns this at its proper speed, and does a good job of it. Low C1, No C2 errors and perfect transfer graphs.

Excellent IMO.

Those tests are rather useless because BenQ 1620 is not able to report C2 errors...

IIRC your Litey (JLMS HD166S) should be able to do this, but not with the best accuracy.

Benq 1620 is brilliant for burning most cd's except games. I have rewritten over 500 times to Traxdata rw's and no probs. Burns better than my Cyberdrive and burns great on Imation, Traxdata and most other resonable quality cdr's. I find that the best quality burns with B7U9 are at 16X for audio cd's and any speed for data.

Yes it can .... but I can find a disk at the moment that will show it (damn me looking after disks too well).

I will use kprobe on a USB attached Liteon LTR-52327S and rescan the disks.

First the ricoh 10speed CD-RW

The 24 speed verbatim:

Finally the Datastream 4x CD-RW (700 meg) There are some C2 errors that the Benq drive missed, but that could be for a number of reasons:

eg:
1) The benq actually can't read C2 errors correctly.
2) The Liteon drive doesn't have the same level of vibration control as the benq, and is reading the CD-RW at stupidly fast speeds ( > 40 speed )
3) The operation of my liteon drive was never the best, so I can't rule that out either.

Even if the liteon drive is correct, it is still a pretty good for an old disk that was just laying around

Hmmm.... In my humble opinion, the best CD burner EVER created was the NEC ND-2500A or ND-2510A DVD Burner. Low C1/No C2 and VERY low jitter with practically ANY media you throw at it, even the really old 4x stuff. Just amazing!

Regards,
TerminalVeloCD