I agree. The LiteOn drives may not be the king of DVD-write quality, but they are great at other things, like reading, CD copy protection, recovering damage discs, CD-writing, and tweakability. This comes at the cost of not being able to use cheap media, but that’s fine with me. Most of my discs burnt are data backup discs that I want to have last for years to come, and back when I used CD-Rs, even though newer drives all burn just fine on crap media like LeadData, I still tried to avoid them if possible because I wanted media longevity–what’s the use of low error levels now if the chemical dye isn’t properly stabilized and will decay faster? I mean, I’m not one of those people who went off and grabbed premium brands (I got TY CD-Rs only when Fuji discs had a big rebate sale–otherwise, I generally got Riteks), and when it comes to DVD media, I’m not one to go off dumping tons of money into expensive TY and or MCC/Verbatim media. But good media is not expensive. If you look for the right prices, good media is often priced at around $1 USD per disc…
I also agree about quality control. I read somewhere that the manufacturers sort out the discs that they make. The highest quality discs are sold to the OEMs, like Fuji, who rebrand the discs as their own. And then the next level of quality gets sold as “Grade A” and the next as “Grade B.” And although this is just one data point, I found my Fuji RICOHJPNR01s (which, BTW, I got at only $1/disc) to burn VERY nicely while some RICOHJPNR01s that my friend has that were sold directly under the Ritek label didn’t burn as well.