----------------------------------- jkf Sun 27 May, 2007 Never Used Features that Never Worked... ----------------------------------- I finally got tired of burning two DVDs per season on some of my favorite shows. They would fit on a single DVD+R DL and that would make my collection nice and trim. Up until quite recently, the best price I can get for a DVD+R DL was almost US$3. At that price, I stuck to burning multiple disks since I can buy single layer blanks for less than 25 cents. No big deal, if you made a few coasters... I have three DL capable burners that I have never used to burn a DL blank, until a few days ago. I found a 30pk of DLs for US$39... 1.30 each... now thats about the same price as CD-Rs were when it started coming down in price... I remember paying US$4 for premium CD-Rs when they first came out, so I decided to try experimenting with them... Of course, the very first one I made on the HP burner came out good, until I played it back on a standalone DVD player... about 1/2 way in, the DVD started to skip so I checked it back on the HP burner... it played fine, I played it on 2 other standalone DVD players and only one of them played it without mistakes. So I figured maybe the 2 standalone players were not too good... but I was curious about this so I made another one on the LiteOn burner. Now this time, the DVD played on all the standalone and computer DVD players. So it seems that the alignment on the HP burner is slightly off and I would never have known until I tried it with a DL... and wasted a lot of money making coasters. I also tried another experiment with an LG burner, this one with Lightscribe. The HP and the LiteOn both have Lightscibe but I never bother with it because the disk costs about 3x more than regular ones and it takes forever to burn the labels if you want them to come out dark enough to see it in daylight... Come to find out that Lightscribe doesn't work on the LG properly... and it works correctly on the other drives. Well, I know I paid extra $$$ for those capabilites that I never used (nice to have) but not necessary, only to find out that when you decide to use it, it doesn't work but I've owned it long enough so I cannot take them back to the store or have it fixed for free any more... So the bottom line is... we need to buy only the features that we plan to use right away, or else find out later that you might have gotten a lemon, but never knew it was broke, and I think a lot of manufacturers kind of have this in mind when they sell it to you... (like the early USB ports, that were there but never wired correctly) ----------------------------------- wAsTeD_C Mon 28 May, 2007 Re: Never Used Features that Never Worked... ----------------------------------- So the bottom line is... we need to buy only the features that we plan to use right away, or else find out later that you might have gotten a lemon, but never knew it was broke, and I think a lot of manufacturers kind of have this in mind when they sell it to you... (like the early USB ports, that were there but never wired correctly) this applies with women as well ;p ----------------------------------- aiolos Mon 28 May, 2007 Re: Never Used Features that Never Worked... ----------------------------------- It applies to a lot of things, but usually we don't have the choice. We pay extra for things that are very often only marketing gimmics. The prime example of useless features are cellphones. They are jammed with features that very few people ever use (or even know they exist) just so they can have a longer feature list in the window of the shop. P.S. Nokia just applied for a patent that allows the phone to detect lightning... :roll: ----------------------------------- wAsTeD_C Tue 29 May, 2007 Re: Never Used Features that Never Worked... ----------------------------------- P.S. Nokia just applied for a patent that allows the phone to detect lightning... LOL.