I don't know where Tennoh gets his information but CDRLABS.com has never reviewed a Pioneer 111 and CDRInfo only gives it 8/10, and on LG, some of the 416x series got better scores than the xx series has. Benq 1600 series and Philips (probably come off the same production lines) have been the high scorers recently.
. Anyone know what's up with CDRInfo - they haven't done a burner review since June of '06???
Slugbait,
... Plextor leaving optical drive business...
Here is Plextor's statement:
"Shinano Kenshi Co., Ltd., the parent company of Plextor, has announced today a plan to perform corporate reorganization and reduce Plextor's optical drive business operations, corresponding to the deterioration of its business environment.
Plextor responed to the various recent reports that indicated that Plextor would exit the market of consumer CD and DVD products:
"Although Plextor's optical drive operations will be reduced, our business itself will still continue," says Motoaki Kaneko, the president of Shinano Kenshi. "We do have a plan to release consumer drives while our engineering team will be engaged more in the development for business use equipment."
The company also says that there will be no change in the operations for Plextor-branded industrial equipment and DAISY-based audio recorder/reproducer for visually handicapped people.
Plextor entered into the optical disk drive market in early '90s and recorded highest revenue by introduction of 12x CD-R drive in 2000. However, its recent sales has been slow because of the increased competition from Taiwanese and Korean manufacturers."
IMO, Plextor should move production back to Japan or somewhere that quality can be more tightly controlled and get back to designing and building the best drives that the current technology allows. That would take care of the "business environment" problem... Since the 712 which got more 10/10 scores than any drive since, they have really dropped off both in design goals and production quality. If they want to also sell "consumer grade" drives (I guess the 740 which was basically a Benq/Phillips drive was the first and the failed 750A (Teac/Panasonic based) the next effort in that category), name them something other than Plextor so the brand doesn't get watered down.
.bh.