what is the newest nec dvdr drive? is it the 3550A? and is the 3550a any good. also I found a BenQ 1620pro for about $60 at a local compuer shop is that a good deal? I know Newegg ran out of the 1640's for a while. Does Benq have a newer drive? if so is it any good? and does is it still use the same Benq/Phillips chipset as the 1640.
I just got and installed the NEC 3550a and updated my firmware to liggy and dees 1y4 rpc1 which makes it region free and allows for full bitsetting capability. I really like it so far. I did a burn on it at 6x of Predator 2 and got a 97.1 quality scan out of it on Yuden media.
I've got 2 of them,excellent burners.They are suppose to be compatable with the Qsuite 2.0 utility,but the overburn protection doesn't work. That's what sucks about benqs,they overburn 8x media at 12x and 16x!
When I bought my 1640 last fall- $38 - newegg was out of the 1620s. Now it's been the opposite,plenty of 1620s,no 1640s.Gotta download q-suite 2 with this drive. Nero won't booktype with this drive,but will on the 1620 model.
Benq also has the 1655 with the lightscribe feature. That drive should also be around $60-$65. I'm not sure about the chipset.Bigtoxy69 is about to order one of them. That's the newest drive I've heard of,except that DQ model.
I think NEC has a 4550 model? Not sure of what that baby does though.
The 3550 should be a great drive. You can't go wrong with either.
I do love all 3 of my benqs! After booktyping those backups,good luck on finding a stand alone player that won't play them. Well over 99.5% success rate using the quality 8x and 16x media. The error scans are lower when I burn at 8x and 12x.Far better than my 4x backups.
Do not burn at 2.4x on a benq! More errors!
thanks for all the advice guys I went with the 3550a. Ive had this problem with DVD Shrink lately Ive had problems with the bookttype feature it wont let me check/uncheck it. although the good thing is the box is always checked I just cant change it. Does that mean its auto booktyping? Please help with any advice you can give me. Thanks in advance to all that reply
some more things i forgot to add to my previous post that problem happens to all my drives and it only happened when I updated DVD Shrink to 32015 it has always allowed me to switch with the older versions thanks again
treezy: That booktyping setting in DVD Shrink may work on some drives,but not all drive. I use Nero to autoburn after DVD Shrink gets through encoding to harddrive. On both my benq 1620s,my backups are booktyped. On my Benq 1640,it wouldn't booktype. The q-suite 2.0 does the booktyping for me.
Here's a simple way to check.Try dvdidentifier or dvdinfopro.Nero infotool may also tell you. Mine looks like this:
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Unique Disc Identifier : [DVD+R:MCC-003-000]
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Disc & Book Type : [DVD+R] - [DVD-ROM]
Manufacturer Name : [Mitsubishi Chemical Corp.]
Manufacturer ID : [MCC]
Media Type ID : [003]
Product Revision : [Not Specified]
Blank Disc Capacity : [2,295,104 Sectors = 4.70 GB (4.38 GiB)]
Recording Speeds : [1x-2.4x , 4x , 6x-8x]
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[ DVD Identifier - http://DVD.Identifier.CDfreaks.com ]
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Mine says disc type and booktype.If it wasn't booktyped,it'd say this:
Disc and booktype: [Dvd+r] - [Dvd+r]
I just now noticed my verb lightscribe +8x code as Mcc-003! I can't believe I didn't ID them before.Sweet!
Here's using dvdinfopro:
Media Information
Disc Regions are 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
Media code/Manufacturer ID MCC 003
Media Product Revision Number 00h
Format Type UDF 1.02
Volume Name LAND_OF_THE_DEAD
Application id
Implementation id AHEAD Nero
Recording Date/Time (mm/dd/yyyy) 1/ 5/2006 19:18:59
Format Capacity 4.26GB(4.57GB)
Book Type DVD-ROM
Media Type DVD+R
Manufacturer Rated Speed 8.0x 11080KBps
Data area starting sector 30000h
Data area end sector 22121Fh
Linear Density 0.267um/bit
Track Density 0.74um/track
Number of Layers 1
