Say you have 4x disk, and you drive is an 8x, basically that means that you'll only be able to burn at 4x right? also evethough i can burn aat 4x, if i burn at a slower speed will i get better quality?
Thats the way it normally works, although with "hacked" firmware, say for a Pioneer A-07 drive, good 4X -R media can be burned at 8X.
Unless you are getting errors burning at 4X, I can't see quality being improved by a slower burn speed. Try it for yourself and see.
My reasoning is that the same information, a bunch of pits that represent ones and zeros, is burned regardless of the speed. Now if some small errors are introduced, they may or may not be visible. If the laser and tracking mechanism can keep up, then those errors would be minimal and not effect the quality of the picture, as far as the eye could tell anyhow. I'm no expert on this so other opinions would be most helpful.
As a rule it has always been assumed that the slower the burn then the more accurate the result will be.
I have a pioneer 107 with the hacked firmware. It will burn to any dvd-r at 8xspeed, even the 2xspeed ones. And my backups are always excellent quality.
Technology today is advancing at such a rate that with modern equipment, faster burning produces no significant loss of quality.
Having said that, I had one hell of a time earlier this week copying one of my old copy protected pc games.
The only way I could do it successfully was to drop the read speed down to 1x and the burn speed down to 4x.
It really depends on what you are burning and what equipment you are using to burn with.
I have a bunch of Memorex -Rs, When I burn them at 8X I almost always get a freeze or someother glitch. Riteks seem to do a lot better. Nowdays I just leave the the at 4X. I'm only burning once or twice a week so no point in the faster burns.
I don't know how great that hack actually is, it always does a switch from 6X to 8x at around 20% which seems to be where the slight freeze on the Memorex occurs. Probably the media. I've only got two left anyhow.
