I had read that the 1640 was an excellent reader and since I was bored today I decided to try and find out how good it was. I have two backup movies that the kids have scratched and gouged to the point they wont play.( I allready made them new copies from the original but have kept these damaged copies for experimenting) in fact no DVD ROM or burner I had tried could even acess them.( Aopen 1648\AAP, Toshiba 1912,Lite On 167T, BenQ 1620, Plextor 708A, Plextor 712A.) to my suprise the 1640 was able to at least recognize the disks but I could not acess it with explorer. but with Ultra ISO and the 1640 I was able to retrieve the data from the disk and even burn it with CLoneDVD2 and walla!! they play perfectly. I am seriously impressed wtih the 1640 as a reader.

Great reader, very close to the speed of the Lite-on 16P9S - the lite-on wins in some cases, the benq can win some others.

Really good! BenQ and Liteon the best (Price+Quality)

My stock Benq came with BSHB firmware and it read bad discs excellently.

However i have recently upgraded to BSJB and find that while the Write quality is the same for DvD +R 8x Media that i use - the reading quality seems to have gone down.

In particular i am getting read errors(for select discs) when i do a DVD copy using Nero Burning ROM when it creates the image. I was able to do this successfully earlier with BSHB with the same discs. The discs in discussion have been burned by some other DVD burner.

So my questions are:

Does the new firmware (BSJB) degrade the read performance of the drive.If no, should i try flashing the Firmware again.

While reading discs (especially those that are slightly scratched) the drive also seems to change the read speeds very often. (Accelerating and De-Accelerating) . Is this normal for a Benq.

Lastly are there any cons to repeated firmware flashing. For ex if i flash BJSB again or go back to BSHB. Will it harm the drive in any way..


Thanks,

Maybe if you flashed it 24 times a day every day for a year then maybe so no it shouldnt harm the drive.

Most flash memory has a lifetime of 100,000 flashes minimum so i cant see you getting that many flashes in the drives lifetime.

Thanks for the replies.

So can the drive be flashed to any firmware. For ex if someone has the BSGB firmware installed can he go directly to BSJB. Or should the flashing be done serially as in BSHB, BSIB and then BSJB?


From the replies i can infer that people here have not experienced reading problems with the BSJB.

Can someone please let me know if BSJB is better than BSHB.Would you recommend me to flash back to BSHB or try reflashing BSJB again to see if there is any improvement.

I hope something works out..coz i would hate to RMA this baby.

You can flash directly from any 1640 fw to any other 1640 fw.

I'm actually not that impressed with the BenQ 1640 as a reader, my Pioneer dvd119 reads high error discs at close to full speed, while the 1640 struggles reaching 1x, and then errors out. Mind you these are extreme cases, with PIE and PIF in the thousand range. Even stranger is that when scanning with Nero CD/DVD Speed it reads at the selected speed (well errors just gets "skipped" then anyway...). Not sure if this made much sense, but hey.

Edit: Forgot to mention that firmware haven't made a difference in my case. Though I should mention that I've had the best experience with BSIB so far. I'm not regretting that I bought the drive, I'm more than happy with it.

Q.

Hi
I would rate the 1640 as a very good reader. I currently have 8 (7 in use 1 spare) & they always seems to read at upto X16.Only once have they failed regardless of f/w. This was one time when my Plextor 716 showed it's class.

If you call a fast reader a good reader, you all might be right. But I don't really find the error correction that good. My Matshita Notebook drive is way better in that respect. But it is hard to beat that drive, not even specialists like Toshibas or the Aopen 1648AAP can cath up.

sj

Hi
If you look at my post, I put very good reader first. This seems logical to me as pointless having a drive rip at X >16 if successful rips only 50% or less. Therefore I'm saying that the 1640 in my experience is second only to the Plextor in terms of error correction, but has proved also to be the quickest drive I've ever had.

Talking of quick rips... did you also notice, that the read speed is sometimes very low on some pressed SL media, somewhere around 2-4x. The weird thing though, that the same trouble making disc is read w/out any probs short after!? Very strange all that... but it may be a software prob. It only occured w/ DVDDecrypter so far.

sj