I read this over a xbox scene by a member and wanted to confirm this. He goes as far to say you can use the Benq Qsuite program to set the drive to bitset dvd-rom.
If this is true, that Plextor just rebadges other products I am no longer purchasing Plextor drives. They aren’t really anything special in todays homogenized market.
The 740A is truly a DW1640, but most of Plextor’s DVD burners are their own design. The 708A, 712A, 716A, 755A and 760A are all original Plextor drives.
Great. So I wasted $50 for no reason. Plextor doesn’t make a competitive product anyways, no more plextor.
Well, Fluxburn, I feel your pain, although I bought my 716a for $122, and it’s only used for ripping (no riplock), as it scans wayyyyyyyyyy to slowly, and I felt the write strats could have been better. Plextor has really kicked itself in the head several times with either very lax q/a, lackluster customer service, and stopped being the company it once was. I’ve kicked myself many times for not doing a little more research, or I would gotten a much better LiteOn 1693s, for example. Just do what I do now, and really dig for reviews, especially anything problematic about a certain model, and just be patient. 
Hey, at least you can crossflash that 740a to the BenQ1640, and at least use the BSLB firmware, which seems to be the most stable and consistent f/w for that unit (although I’m having good results with BSPB).
I read reviews about liteon and how they were so cheap and good. But I always heard about how plextor had the best drives. I always wanted a plextor but never could afford it. Then I buy one and they break the trust. Also the product line has just gone the drain. When they go bankrupt, they will not be missed.
btw what is rip lock
riplock is something on a burner that prevents it from reading a DVD-ROM past a certain speed. The Plextor 716a at least will read those up to 16x (although when I rip, I have it set for 12x max). Because of the riplock limitation on some drives (if you don’t flash your drive with something to remove it), some will never read very fast at all, say 4x or so.
Ripping means when you’re reading data from the media in question, basically, and copying it to another source, like your HDD.
I love my PX-712A/UF and 755SA. Original Plextor drives, great write quality, and have all the Plextor-only features.
What features? All the new cool features these days I see from other companies. Write quality? If it burns correctly it burns correctly. Liteon and others offer products just as good as plextor at a 1/5 the price. But I guess a few hardcore fans like you will stick with them, even though they lost the competitve advantage 2 years ago.
No one has GigaRec besides Plextor. AutoStrategy was pioneered by Plextor but later emulated by BenQ with SolidBurn. Plextors are a bit more reliable when it comes to doing error scanning as they don’t seem to favor discs written by particular burners as is the case with others like BenQ and Lite-On. As for write quality, just check some of the drive-specific threads in this forum about Plextor scans.
Liteon good? Well, I do not know how you formed this opinion, but I previously had a Liteon 1693S that burn DVDs which cannot be read by itself!! :a
So much for Liteon being good. I vowed never to buy a Liteon DVD burner again and am now happily using a Plextor PX755A. 
Yes, it is more expensive than a Liteon, but to me it is much better than Liteon.
ah I am just pissed they rebraded a benq as a plextor
Fortunately you didn’t pay a premium for it if you said it cost $50; that’s about the price of a retail BenQ burner. Plextor apparently wanted a lower cost drive to market to buyers who aren’t interested in the features of their flagship drives, so they rebadged the DW1640 as the 740A. In times past, for the Asian market, they released slightly downgraded versions of their own drives at a lower cost (i.e. the PX-708A2 was a 712A with DVD+R locked to 8x and no support for PlexTools Q-Check features).
no my plextor 740a cost $90. So I got ripped off an official $50 by plextor…
I had the 740a - worked great! Although I used the benq firmware. I foolishly replaced it with a PX-755SA - total POS! I can’t copy DVDs without glitches, I can’t use vision to convert AVIs to DVDs (without sync issues, glitches, other pixel blotches). I thought that Plextor made good drives - turns out they scoop dog poop into boxes and sell it for $100 and idiots such as myself end up buying it. I’m going to see if I can track down a good deal on a new DW1640. I may keep teh 755 to remind myself to do more research before wasting money on parts without testing.
I’m oooh so enjoying “working” with their tech support team. I’m thinking someone’s little 13 year old brother is filling in for a real employee based on the responses I’ve gotten.
well they are hurting their reputation. maybe they shouldn’t have gone retail. Guess competition forced them to go that way. I hate seeing this stuff. I’ve used Plextor for many years and my last drive only lasted a year. That was not the premium drive. I bought another one, this time the premium. If this one kicks the bucket in a year I’m going to look for something else, but not from Plextor.
I dont know why you are pissed?? At least they rebadged a good drive, lucky they did not go south and rebadge a liteon, just that buying under plextor brand pays extra fee for that brand. I stop buying plextor drives the day I saw the drive was made in China. My last Plextor drive was a SCSI CDR drive. If I buy a chinese made drive, I wont pay more than $50 for it. And Now I am a proud BenQ drive owners, with 4 BenQ drives Total (BenQ 1620, 1640, 1655, and 1670 all under $35 a piece, they all serve me well and very reliable. The only thing I did not realize is the 1670, they use panasonic chip and thus not as good as the traditional philip chip. I haven’t had a bad BenQ as reported.