Plextor is the “high end” name in CD/DVD drives, but they carry a high premium.  Most go with middle-of-the-road brands like LG or BenQ, including myself until recently.

My BENQ DW1650 drive seemed a stalwart workhorse for a couple years, but started with quirks: turning rewritable discs into coasters, insisting taking the disc out and putting it back in… I thought it was just the new discs I was using, but the clincher came when burning wedding picture DVDs for friends.  While the DW1650 could read the discs it created, my friends’ vanilla DVD reader could not; a frustrating waste of time as I diagnosed the problem, and a disconcerting worry for backups I have on DVD.

Plextor prices have come down a lot; they used to cost a few hundred for even the lowest end one.  Typically I don’t chase brand names in technology, going by specs, but clearly box specs alone didn’t tell the full story here.  So this time around I went with the Plextor PX820-SA.

They look about the same outside, but the new burner is worlds different.  Compared to the BENQ, the Plextor:

• was able to use the discs that the DW1650 had decided were coasters, with a simple erase.
• can read newly burned discs immediately, without ejecting the tray.
• created discs that could be read by everyone else’scomputers.

Perhaps it’s merely the newness and not the Plextor name that created good results, and the new burner will get flaky with age, but I certainly hope not.  The salesman I bought the drive from told me something interesting, though:

• Him: “You know why people buy Plextors, right?”
• Me: “Yup…” (thinking quality), “… wait, why?”
• Him: “To burn copyrighted DVDs.”

Oops.  Still totally worth getting for non-piracy uses, just to save the hassle of realizing a disc works on one computer and not another.