NEC 2500A@2510A
The 2510A NEC is also a dual layer DVD burner and will be available from the end of June. With a more reasonable price than the SOHW-832S, it is considered as an interesting alternative choice. If you want to save even more money, you can choose the 2500A. This burner is identical to the 2510A without the possibility to burn DL media. However you can change it to a 2510A with a firmware downloadable here.
Be careful this firmware change cancels the guaranty! Thanks to the KOP2 firmware, the 2500A is changed into a 2510A, it also modify the player in a RPC1 (without any zone restriction) and deactivate the rip lock which prevent the burner from ripping DVD at 8X speed. As you can see below from the information obtained with Nero InfoTool after flashing it: the 2500 is indicated as a 2510A and the DVD+R DL reading and burning box are ticked.
Some burners aren´t DL compatible but can become compatible only by changing the firmware. However, even if these changes worked perfectly with our burner it is not always true. Depending on the series the KOP2 doesn´t activate functionally the DVD+R DL burning. Nothing to worry about but it is possible that you might not be able to burn DVD+R9. The official SOHW-832S or 2510A DL burner have been calibrated and tested as a DL burner. However the 2500 hasn´t been tested for DL and the calibration isn´t necessarily optimized. The efficiency of this new firmware is unpredictable for this aspect.
We have made the same compatibility and burning tests with a Verbatim DVD+R DL burnt by a 2500A flashed in a 2510A. The qualitative result is impressive as Kprobe report a PI and PIF average ratio below to the results of the Liteon 832 S with the same media. The reading compatibility is equivalent as the Liteon 832S. Even if, the NEC 2510A is able to re-read its own burned media (which is the minimum required).
