Holiday Shopping Roundup: Eight Dual Format Recordable DVD Drives
by Kristopher Kubicki on December 11, 2003 10:54 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Tech Support
One key item that we have overlooked in most of our optical display reviews is technical support. Our very our Evan Lieb pioneered the original tech support benchmark for motherboards and today, we will attempt to replicate that benchmark with our optical storage vendors.We used three camouflaged email addresses and emailed particularly trivial questions concerning our burners to each vendor. For other tech support that was capable of responding to all 3 emails within 72 hours (5 business days), we averaged the three times together for a final result.
| Average Customer Support Response Time | |
| ASUS | No Response |
| Gigabyte | 38 hours, 12 minutes |
| LiteOn | 41 hours, 20 minutes |
| MSI | No Response |
| NEC | 29 hours, 48 mintues |
| Nu Tech | N/A |
| Plextor | 11 hours, 10 minutes |
| Sony | 6 hours, 44 minutes |
Hands down, Sony had the best technical support. An interactive ticker kept our problem up to date via email. There was also an online interactive help, which we used, and had our problem answered in less than 8 minutes. However, even by using the email ticker, we had our problems answered by an average of 4 hours before the nearest competitor (no surprise, Plextor).
You may be surprised that neither MSI nor ASUS were capable of responding to any of our three questions within 72 hours. However, to give these two some credit, the answers to our questions were found in their knowledge database. Nevertheless, the same could be said for Sony and Plextor. (Looking carefully, Plextor answered our problems right in the manual). Unfortunately, there was not much difference in support between our two $100 burners. We were expecting much better product support from NEC than LiteOn, but our averaged response time on our emails was less than 3 hours apart.
Nu Tech's customer support was lacking by a little. There was no email address, nor number to contact for technical support. Unusually, the general “comments” section required a birth date in order to submit. The site also had problems working under Mozilla. We informed Nu Tech and they are currently working on the problem.
Our customer support response time test did not give Sony or Plextor the leading edge since all our questions were answered incredibly fast via more than one method.
Let's get burning!
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nopcbs - Thursday, December 25, 2003 - link
I don't understand the big concern that people have with +/- write compatability. If you get a + camp burner with bitsetting capability that gets you access to virtually all set top players by setting the DVD book type to DVD-ROM on the disk you video create. The + camp recorders still read the - camp disks, too. The only thing you miss is the ability to write to - camp disks, but who cares unless you already have a bunch of them? The + disk are as easy or easier to find and often cheaper. The high speed (8x) - camp format seems to exist only in theory (the NEC 2500 MAY be an exception, no tests available as yet), too,while there are loads of + 8x burners around.Who needs - camp format write ability, in other words? The format should have died a peaceful death except for Pioneer's stubborness.
Is there fault in my reasoning?
- nopcbs
SUOrangeman - Sunday, December 21, 2003 - link
Forgot to mention, I think the NEC ND2500 claims to do 8x DVD-R.http://store.yahoo.com/livewarehouse/frfesashnd8x....
-SUO
SUOrangeman - Sunday, December 21, 2003 - link
Speaking of the NuTech firmware ... did they deliver on the 15th?The NEC ND2500 id now available at LiveWarehouse.
Pioneer A07 is supposed to show next month.
I recently read that the Sony is dropping OptoRite-made drives and will now go with LiteOn units for 8x (DRU-530). I can only presume that the current 530s are equivalent to the DD401 while any forthcoming 530s will be equivalent to the 811.
-SUO
thepriceisright - Friday, December 19, 2003 - link
I like the articles here but sometimes I wonder...The Liteon drive did exceptionally well other than the fact it doesn't burn at 8x like the plextor.
I really *dislike* how you guys do the roundups sometimes its like comparing a 9600 to a 9800xt. No duh the 9800xt will win but sometimes price is a important deciding factor. This was just a example.
Do a review with only top of the line drives either in stats or price ranges. Or if that review would be too short then use the skills that got you this job and add a note saying something along the lines of; “Although the cheaper Liteon drive did not come with the burning software I myself would like to of had the $100+ price tag makes it a tempting buy. If money was of no concern the Plextor drive is the Cadillac of dvd burners and is sure to be worthy of the hefty price tag.” Since I am not a reviewer I am sure you can use those skills to spruce it up.
LoneWolf15 - Monday, December 15, 2003 - link
I would have liked to see the firmware versions Anandtech posted listed under each review. Then we could tell if Nu-Tech has released new firmware for their writer, for example. It is a good reference.Aside from that it was an excellent article. Thanks very much for reviewing something I know we all want to know about.
holymaniac - Monday, December 15, 2003 - link
Anyone know which DVDRW is the quietest?KristopherKubicki - Monday, December 15, 2003 - link
ChefJoe: It turns out the 107 drives probably will not be capable of 8X DVD-R (At least at Computex Taipei and COMDEX Las Vegas they were not). I'm willing to bet the delay in release is NEC and Pioneer working on making those drives 8X DVD-R capable. All our sources say its physically the pickup that is not capable of DVD-R 8X, not the burn strategies/firmware.Kristopher
Boonesmi - Monday, December 15, 2003 - link
i wish you had included the pioneer A06 driveChefJoe - Sunday, December 14, 2003 - link
Any news on the Pioneer A07 ? Back in September's plextor article it was said " Pioneer and NEC are both expected to produce 8X capable DVD+R and DVD-R capable drives in November (DVR-A07 and ND-2300A, respectively), but Plextor has the upper hand with market saturation and aggressive pricing. "I'm really interested in an 8x Pioneer.
DonB - Sunday, December 14, 2003 - link
I'd like to see it commented somewhere in DVD articles which drives (if any) are able to play any region DVDs and which are locked to a certain region.