Plextor closes it's doors to CD and DVD products

I used exclusively Plextor drives for years until they got out of SCSI. They were late into DVD, which started the slide. In the end, I had to go with Sony for my DVD+-RW drive because Plextor was too late.

Lately, I understand a lot of their drives are rebadged drives made by someone else.

Crap...thanks for the notice.. I'll buy another Plextor drive so I can use it with Plextor Tools to rips lossless to Flac... A lot easier than using EAC.

My 716A drive died and they sent me an email they offer no service on their gear anymore now hearing this makes sense.

Too bad. I'm glad I was able to snatch a Plextor Premium when I had a chance. Thing is the best CD drive I've ever had (and I've had a few).

Plextor is not getting out of the cd and dvd drive business. Here is a statement fro the website:

FREMONT, Calif. – January 23, 2007 - Plextor® LLC, a leading developer and manufacturer of high-performance digital media equipment, today reaffirmed its commitment to the optical disc drive business in North and South America. On January 19, 2007, Shinano Kenshi Co., Ltd., the parent company of Plextor, announced plans to perform a corporate reorganization to streamline Plextor's optical drive business to enhance operating efficiencies.
“This announcement by Shinano Kenshi will have no material affect on the operations of Plextor LLC, as we already completed a corporate reorganization in North and South America last year. Our business will continue as usual,” said Toru Nakazawa, President of Plextor LLC, USA. “It is unfortunate that an incorrect translation of a Japanese article, which contained some errors, has led to the rumor that Plextor is somehow quitting the optical disc drive business. This is completely false. In fact, Plextor plans to continue to lead the market with innovative, exciting products that solve real world problems for our consumer and business customers. We deeply appreciate the loyalty of our customers and valued business partners. And we look forward to many years of future success.”

About Plextor
Plextor LLC is a leading developer and manufacturer of high-performance digital media equipment for professionals, consumers, and enterprises. Headquartered in Silicon Valley since 1990, Plextor has introduced generations of award-winning products, including digital video converters and CD-R/RW, DVD±R/RW, and Blu-ray optical disk drives. Contact Plextor at www.plextor.com

Arnold, Thank you for the timely information. I appreciate it and I am sure many others appreciate it as well.

Arnold,

So glad to see your contribution. Thank you for the update indeed.

This panick inducing thread caused me to look for another high end brand and I found "LaCie," which appears to be even more expensive than Plextor. Anyone tried them?

And does anyone know of a BD-ROM drive on the market? Not a triple burner or a burner of any sort whatsover, I want a ROM drive.

We've used numerous LaCie burners, hard drives, and monitors at work for years. We're an all Mac environment and LaCie provides good support for Mac, which isn't the case for many Plextor products. I've had very good results burning CDr's with the Lacie Porsche design model using both Itunes and Toast, but I never A/B'd the results against a Plextor.

The advantage of buying a plextor is you can use Pextor Professional Tools to rip FLAC lossless and it is calibrated for the drive similar to Exact Copy without all the hassel of initial configuration. This is why I choose to spend more for the plextor drives.

Should Pextor Professional Tools come with my Plextor drive? I can't seem to find it. Can you remember if your drive came with 2 CDs? I just have the one and it does not seem to have Pextor Professional Tools.

Regards,

on the older drives you receive the Plextor Tools Professional LE version which can still do it.. some came with the Professional XL versions which have more features but they $$$.

http://www.plextools.com/download/download.asp

There is a new LE version that works on Vista also.
The interface is really simple since it lacks features, But that makes it easy.

I thought I read that BenQ made some of the drives for Plextor or they were going to be??? I do know that some of the BenQ and Plextor drives are virtually identical in parts & chipsets. The BenQ DW1655 scored as good as or better than the Plextors for CD reading/burning @ cdrinfo.com.