Need advice on new burner

TedHuge

Hi All

First time poster here. Been doing a fair bit of research on dvd burners over the past few days, and pretty much every search has led me to this site in some way.

So I'm looking to pick up a new DVD / CD burner. It will be going in an older PC for the time being, with the likelihood that it will migrate to a better machine down the road.

Current <intended> home: Athlon 800, 512 M SD RAM (don't recall speed or timings), ASUS board (don't remember model), Maxtor HD.

Future home: P3 1.8, Intel Board, 512 M DDR, unsure of brand of HDs....and I think it has a uDMA controller on the board (again, not certain...this is an inherited machine)

So the models that I've been looking at are:

the Lite On LH-18A1P here

the LG GSA-H22N
here

and the LG LH-H22L
here

I'm not overly concerned with price. The prices I've been seeing these at range from high 30's to mid-fifties, in CAD. If I'm honest with myself, I have to admit that I have absolutely no need for lightscribe....but I also have the heartfelt belief that gadgets / tech is cool. I will mainly be using the drive to make backups of movies, as well as storing family pics and the like. I'm far more concerned with dependability and burn quality than I am with speed.

Does anyone have any recommendations, given the above?

Thanks in advance.

~KIPPER~

Ted

Welcome to the forum

Have you read any of the reviews here at CDF, you will find them here:

http://www.cdfreaks.com/reviews/

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coathi

Yes they are cool ! But the more gadgets it has there is a higher chance of something malfunctioning or giving you problems. I use both Lite-On and LG and the link The Kipper gave you has a lot of good info on the drives.

TedHuge

Thanks to both of you. The reading I've done so far has me leaning towards the H22N. I see that several members here have found that the burn quality is <mysteriously> better on the 22N versus the 22L, and there's little point to paying extra for a lightscribe drive, to say nothing of higher costs for the media, when a Sharpie should do the job just as well

BurningFish

I don't think so, that are normal quality variations in series nowadays. And by the way Lightscribe is in my opinion a useless feature, to slow, to bad quality, to expensive. Nice thing for the marketing guys and the featurelist.

Take a Canon printer and you can label cheaper printable discs in a minute in colour and better quality. No need for that lightshit.

coathi

Your leaning the right way