I have both the 1650@BCFC and 1655@BCGB and I'm happy with them in everything but DL burning. I used to use LiteOn drives in the past, but decided to wait b4 buying a new Liteon model, at least until their new Solidburn style firmwares mature. The 1650 and 1655 are both decent drives, (as well as the older DW1640 which sports firmware that has matured nicely), but remember that LiteOn has acquired BenQ so we should be able to see some decent new drives emerging from this partnership in the near future.
If you want a seriously good reader of damaged/scratched media I'd recommend the Samsung SH-W162C, it is by far my fastest burner with consistently decent quality, and it can also succesfully rip some heavily damaged discs that wouldn't rip with ANY of my other active drives. You probably already know this as it has been covered b4 in this forum, but I will repeat it for the benefit of newer users: If you go for the Samsung and want to do quality scans with Nero CD-DVD Speed, don't forget after installing the drive to go to the Windows registry to the follwing key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Ahead\Nero Toolkit\CD Speed\CD Quality
In there there is a value called Blocked, open that and remove the TSST entry so it looks like this:
SAMSUNG,HL-DT-ST,PLEXTOR
Close registry editor and you're done.