Advantages: Easy to use Disadvantages: Dreadfully unreliable
I have always been a strong supporter of LiteOn DVD products, as well as a DVD writer in one of my PC's I have two LiteON DVD players and two different LiteON DVD recorders all of which I have reviewed and been fiercely proud of; however a recent budget purchase has put LiteOn on a much different plateau in my mind.
In our new home the size of one of my DVD recorders meant that a new purchase was needed; room in our bedroom in a little scarce as we traded down to increase our financial situation. With new bedroom furniture in it meant an existing recorder was millimetres to big for the location. So I headed off into town where I purchased the LiteOn LVW-1105 from Currys. Digital, priced at just £79. Proudly rushing home with my new toy under my arm I was confident that the LiteOn brand was the one for me.
Install is straight ...
Advantages: Cheap, can be made multi-region. Works well. PC Pro Best Buy Disadvantages: Doesn't alter the fact that dual layer media is not cheap! Possible dual-layer compatibility issues with home DVD players
It's about three years since I first bought a DVD-writing machine for my main desktop PC. This was an NEC model 1300a and was one of the first to handle both DVD-R and DVD+R formats, without paying the somewhat inflated prices being bandied around by Sony at the time. Overall, I think it cost me around £130.
Oh! How the mighty, (or prices, in this case) have fallen.
I've just taken delivery of a LiteOn SOHW-1693 DVD writer that not only writes to everything that the NEC will, AND with its 16-speed write-velocity it's 4 times faster, but it will handle dual-layer writable DVD media too, and all for £29!
Dual Layer? Yes, one of the limitations of early DVD writers is that they would only write around 4.8 gigabytes of information before becoming full. This might not sound like much of a limitation to those used to a CD-ROM's 700 ...
BNibbles 04.10.2005 (15.10.2005)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of LiteOn SOHW-1693S
Advantages: Good value, space saving, can be made multi-region Disadvantages: Not a DVD-burner, but very little else at this price
from outside of your own Region.
In theory, and having used up your 5 ?lives?, it is possible to get the vendor to reset this by returning the kit to base, and it?s likely to be a particular nuisance to those with DVD collections sporting a mixture of imports and home grown disks. Even the vendor is limited to 4 resets of the 5 choices, leaving the machine practically unusable after 20 regions have been swapped??..or SO they?d like you to think.
I downloaded a natty little utility purposely written for LiteOn machines called LTNRPC which comes in a zip file from www.rpc1.org. This not only allows you to reset the number of regional changes back to 5 every time it gets close to zero, (which in turn uses up one your precious ?vendor resets?) but also allows you to regain the full number of vendor resets too! It does has a facility ...
