A lot of people recommend both the NEC and BENQ the most. The benq was
hyped recently but there were also some posts claiming various BenQs
were different. For instance some posts claimed the Made In china ones
werent as good , reliable. I have no idea if its true.
This applies to the older models like the 1620 and 1625 (the
LightScribe version). The problem is primarily to do with power
regulation. Specifically that some specimens were very sensitive to
poor power regulation from the PSU, causing some weird behaviour and
it seems the ones with a sticker indicating manufacture in mainland
China seem to be more problematic. Since the problem is related to
power regulation, I'm not sure if the manufacturing location is a
coincidence or whether those drives actually are more sensitive.
1. not successfully completing a burn on some of the supported
formats. The drive would burn right up to the end and then drop a "no
sense information error" or some other error.
2. Weirdness with ability to read certain discs.
I own a 1620, and an NEC 3500. The NEC never had any problems out of
the box, but my 1620 exhibited every one of those problems. I return
3 of the BenQs (each time, the store said there was nothing wrong with
the drive), before stumbling over a mention of the PSU issue. On
upgrading to a namebrand PSU, my 1620 works. Same issues were
reported with the Lightscribe version of the drive (1625).
The weirdness with read compatibility remains though, certain brands
of discs employing Pthalocyanine dyes (not all such discs, just some
of them) will read as blank in my Benq 1620. What's weird is that the
discs haven't gone bad. They were burned in that drive, and read fine
in my NEC 3500A but not in the drive that burned it. The other
weirdness is that only SOME pthalocyanine discs give the drive read
indigestion. Cyanine and Azo based discs seem to have no such
problems so far. Very odd. I'd imagine this would be a source of
frustration if the BenQ 1620 were the only optical reader in the
system.
So far, the online comments on the 1640 (BenQ's latest) have been
positive, but as you might imagine, there's a fair bit of confusion in
the discussion as some people have mixed up the 1640 and 1620
discussions. As such, it's hard to tell how much of the power
regulation issues translate to the newer 1640 model. Anyways, if you
opt for a BenQ drive, you may wish to avoid the older 1610, 1620, and
1625 models as those definitely have some issues, especially if you
run on a cheaper PSU.
