CD Freaks presents: Lite-On LH-20A1P Super AllWrite review

The full review can be found here

As always, any comments and discussions are welcome in here in this thread.

The review seems to suffer from an inferiority complex and claims to be only a "preview" on the Introduction page.

I'm still reading the (p)review so more comments later...

uuups , thanks or the report, fixed

The image used for the Traxdata ValuePack (RITEKP16) 16x DVD+R media shows 8x rated media.



EDIT:

The image used for the Ricoh 16x DVD-R (CMC MAG. AM3) media seems to be missing: http://gfx.cdfreaks.com/reviews/lite...e/image122.png

EDIT2: The image used for the Traxdata ValuePack 16x DVD+R media is also used for the Traxdata ValuePack 16x DVD-R (RITEKF1) media, and still showing 8x rated media.

OK now I've read the whole thing.

Thanks for the nice review, Herbert and Jan!

Ricoh image fixed.

The Traxdata image has also been used in other reviews for these media (but nice to see people recognizing such things) . I don't think that it is that important that the speed on the image is correct. Important is that the disc design fits

Hi
All in all excellent stuff. Again! H3rB3i.
However yet again on the negative side MT.Rainer. What latest generation DVDRW's bother with this.
Plus fails to write to some DVD media [*at its rated speed].
Only if you use SmartBurn/HyperTuning etc. At least in my experience.
Lite-On should ditch all that stuff & go with SolidBurn instead.
*Edited after H3rB3i's post. Sorry left that bit off.

---

Last edited by zebadee; 29-04-2007 at 18:52.

I agree with you regarding Mt.Rainer almost no one cares if a drive supports it but some may want to know such things. Because of this it is just mentioned on the negative side and hasn't influenced our conclusion.

It no totally fails, sometimes it fails to write media at their rated speed without any reason (even when OS/HT is disabled) and next time it burns a media from the same batch without any problems. Anyway, in both cases quality is good I just experienced a speed problem.

I wonder how does the drive deal with scratched discs, because some people reported that its an awful reader (particularly for a MediaTek based drive)...

Otherwise, it's an excellent review, thanx for it

I haven't tested mine on scratched discs yet, but on burned DVD media with questionable burn quality, it's even better than my LiteOn SHM-165P6S and roughly equal to my LiteOn SHW1635S. The firmware version can be an important factor in this, as I have seen significant improvements in terms of reported errors on the same disc when upgrading from KL05 firmware to KL0A and KL0G (KL0A improves 16x scanning and KL0G also improves 12x scanning), so if you're not running KL0A/KL0G I suggest upgrading your firmware.

Hi
I've edited my post (as I'd left out the rated speed bit).
However my experience is that if all things such as SmartBurn/HyperTuning etc are disabled then the drives consistancy is near perfect.
As a reader the f/w updates have helped considerably.

Just read the review. MCC004: Much better. Much much better. And even DL burning looks pretty nice. Not a Plextor, not a Pioneer, but it's an all right result I would say.

I just noticing the f/w is old but i see you saw it also

Nice review H3rB3i thanks

Very good review.
It's a very good drive, only a bit noisier than my previous 165P6S.
Except for the +RW problem, the latest firmware is surely better than KL05.

Excellent review H3rB3i, thanks.

“The Lite-On LH-20A1P is an overall average performing drive..."

Perhaps if LiteOn limited the maximum burn speed of most of the 16x media to 12x like the Pioneer DVR-112, this could have said very good or even excellent.

STUPID question Newegg has this drive in a RETAIL box for $32.99 is it the same thing ad this Liteon? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827248006

I need a 2nd burner I have a Sony/Optiarc 5170a that does a great job but I was looking for a little variety...

I guess so , LiteOn is the only 20X burner IIRC , and it has no LightScribe so it is not 20A1H , and it is EIDE not SATA , so it is not 20A1S

Why wouldn't you just get the retail LiteOn for 31.99$ ? :

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827106050


“The Lite-On LH-20A1P is an overall average performing drive..."



From my experience it is an excellent performing drive (for burning , scanning and ripping) , it is not an expert's opinion of course but I don't care about anything in a burner except these three
Maybe I got myself a good unit because it was manufacturered in December 2006 and the reviewed unit was November 2006 .
Here are the latest scans from my drive :


http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.ph...&postcount=551

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.ph...&postcount=552

There's the LG GSA-H55N that can burn at 20x too, but I'm not bothering to waste money on a half-baked drive that is not nearly as good as its predecessor H22N was.

Maybe I'm going to get an LH-20A1P when my Litey 5S dies. Extremely difficult to find any 5S or 6S left in the shop shelves.
I just have to hope that LiteOn will have fixed the bugs till then, but it's already good news that minaelromany is so happy with his drive

is there anyone have a problem when erasing or burning dvd±rw media on KL0G firmware?

Yes, see this thread:

LiteOn 20x drives cannot perform Full Erase on 4x DVD+RW media?

“The Lite-On LH-20A1P is an overall average performing drive..."

Wow I'll rush out and buy 3 .
I currently have a benq 1655 and It may be wearing out. It replaced a liteon 811 that couldn't burn anything right. I didn't really believe dvds could be burned. I thought it was an elaborate hoax to sell media. Then I got the benq and found I could burn any media at nearly any speed. All with good quality. So now that liteon owns benq surely they can make a burner that can learn and adapt to new media. Is this not true? Do some of their drives work well but they have spotty quality? I will need to buy a sata burner soon and I'd like an adaptive burner like the lite on but if it doesn't burn well then I may as well get an LG or samsung that burns current media well and if need be buy a future burner for the future. Hard to rush out and buy an "average" performer.

LH-20A1P reads and writes DVD+R at max 6x instead of 16x on 16x DVD+R Optodisks. Any ideas what I could do to solve this?

Done so far:
Tried multiple disks, f/w is latest on www.us.liteonit.com site -- KL05 11/21/06, but updated it anyway. (Where do you get the other f/w revs I've seen posted here?), checked rated speed using Nero 7, AstraDiag and KProbe2 -- shows this drive rated at DVD+R 6x read and write (instead of 20x), called Lite-On tech support (no answers but to try exchanging drives -- done), shop4tech.com tech support (where I bought the disks -- they said don't buy Lite-On), etc. Don't know what else to try.

Specs come up fine in diags for CD media read and write and reads them at good speed (haven't tried or needed to write to CD media).

Currently set up as master on secondary IDE channel with WD800JB slave attached. PIO 4 and UDMA is on.

System: MSI KM3M mobo, AMD Athlon 2100+ (soon to be 3000+) 1.5GB RAM 250 GB WD primary drive.

What am I doing wrong? Can't find anyone on Google or these forums with the same problem.

Thanks for any ideas you can provide!

btw, wish I had read thru this forum before buying Lite-On. I bought it mainly for DVD data backup. Doesn't look so good compared to a couple of others.

Kroy

first of all sorry for the late reply, I wanted to post this earlier but for some reasons I forgot about it

The main reasons for me to just rate the drive overall average are it's speed problems (dropping back or simply not burning faster) and it's high lead in time.

For examle, I just got an external HP dvd1040e (also a Lite-On 20x clone). This required only 5:13 for a full disc at 20x even though it felt back to 12x when 16x was reached and reached 16x again at the end of the burn. [I just hope I can increase my usb2 speed because I can't wait to see a real 20x burn of this drive.]

Totally agree
If a firmware fix would ever released by LiteOn for these two problems , that drive would be the best burner in the market today and it would even be better than the legendary Benq 1640/165x

Unfortunatly, firmware counts. Sometimes more than hardware. Firmware can actually hide hardware defects. Then again maybe thats what Liteon is doing now. Could it be slowing down to save a burn in a defective burner?
I was hoping to buy a scanning sata burner soon but I guess I will need to just settle for a sata burner that burns well from LG or Samsung. Hopefully if I buy a good burner I won't need to scan my burns every time. The whole point of adaptive burning for me is I don't need to depend on new firmware as new media comes out. But at the very least it needs to burn current media well.