This was the first ever dvd burner I purchased. The attraction was that it was quite cheap at the time (around £80) and was a brand I knew of. The saleman recommended it and that was it. I went and bought it online for half the price than in the shop.
That aside, the drive I got was OEM without and software. Being a novice it took a while to find out that Nero was the best software around and once I had this, I was fine. Installing the burner was easy enough, again its a standard size. The only thing was that in the documentation it said "do not place above any other drive as it gets hot during burning and may damage it". I didnt have a choice and it was happily above my second drive (a toshiba dvd-rom) for over 2 years with no problems at all.
First...a word of warning however. I bought this drive before there was anything else but 1x dvds to burn on. When the new 4x ones came out...the drive did not like them AT ALL. In fact it would sit and burn forever (doing nothing) and overheat, according to pioneers webpage this was because of differences in the disk and if left the drive would burn out. Not a problem as there is a firmware update available. This is where the hastle began.
As I bought my drive OEM, it is not guaranteed that pioneer built it, even though it was sold as a pioneer 104. When I tried to update the firware with pioneers software it said that it was not one of their drives. It gave me a code with which to search (for a long time) for who actually made mine. It turned out to be compaq. Firware update over and it ran perfectly on the new disks.
Whilst this is probably nolonger the case, as any of these drives bought now will be updated already, it might be useful for anyone with an older version of this drive who is lost.
In conclusion, excellent drive and now very cheap. If you can get a faster dvd burner...then I would. It takes over 50 minutes for this to burn a full single layer dvd. I would recommend this as a cheap entry level drive. I would recommend that you now get the newer pioneer 108 (I have also written a review on that drive) as it is much quicker and quite cheap also (£50 online).
More details
Memory / capacity
Satisfactory
Design
Good
Ease of use
Easy
Instruction manual
Satisfactory
Manufacturer Support
Good
Speed
Slow
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