Holiday Shopping Roundup: Eight Dual Format Recordable DVD Drives

Tech Support

One key item that we have overlooked in most of our optical display reviews is technical support. Our very our Evan Lieb pioneered the original tech support benchmark for motherboards and today, we will attempt to replicate that benchmark with our optical storage vendors.

We used three camouflaged email addresses and emailed particularly trivial questions concerning our burners to each vendor. For other tech support that was capable of responding to all 3 emails within 72 hours (5 business days), we averaged the three times together for a final result.

Average Customer Support Response Time
ASUS	No Response
Gigabyte	38 hours, 12 minutes
LiteOn	41 hours, 20 minutes
MSI	No Response
NEC	29 hours, 48 mintues
Nu Tech	N/A
Plextor	11 hours, 10 minutes
Sony	6 hours, 44 minutes

Hands down, Sony had the best technical support. An interactive ticker kept our problem up to date via email. There was also an online interactive help, which we used, and had our problem answered in less than 8 minutes. However, even by using the email ticker, we had our problems answered by an average of 4 hours before the nearest competitor (no surprise, Plextor).

You may be surprised that neither MSI nor ASUS were capable of responding to any of our three questions within 72 hours. However, to give these two some credit, the answers to our questions were found in their knowledge database. Nevertheless, the same could be said for Sony and Plextor. (Looking carefully, Plextor answered our problems right in the manual). Unfortunately, there was not much difference in support between our two $100 burners. We were expecting much better product support from NEC than LiteOn, but our averaged response time on our emails was less than 3 hours apart.

Nu Tech's customer support was lacking by a little. There was no email address, nor number to contact for technical support. Unusually, the general “comments” section required a birth date in order to submit. The site also had problems working under Mozilla. We informed Nu Tech and they are currently working on the problem.

Our customer support response time test did not give Sony or Plextor the leading edge since all our questions were answered incredibly fast via more than one method.

Let's get burning!