Hi:

I have two new optical disk drives and, with both of them I see the following: when ejecting the tray, sometimes the disk gets caught between the tray and the drive body. However, trying older drives, I've never observed this phenomenon. Is it fair to say that, nowadays, the mechanical construction of these drives is of a poor quality?

Truly, if only for the extra work in removing the disk from the drive, this is annoying, I think. The two new "defective" drives are from Philips one, and from Lite-On the other. An old drive that never failed is Sony.

Aside from an answer to the question above, and more importantly, I'd like to get an answer to the following one: does anyone experience the problem here described? Thanks for reading.

Yep, but I think the best phrase to keep in mind here is "You get what you pay for". Some brands (Philips) have upper and lower end models...the cheaper ones are cheaper for a reason.

While you CAN get a DVD burner for $19 these days...it'll BEHAVE like a $19 DVD burner too. Older drives (when they were more expensive), were typically built better.

I always buy cheap drives from LG or Samsung in the 20-25€ price range, and never had problems with them.

I can't really say whether drives have actually decreased in quality over time (being that I'm young and not terribly experienced with hardware ), but a friend of mine has an external USB optical drive that he says tends to be finicky with burning/booting Linux distros. Although, the latter part may have been at least partially due to the fact that at the time, he was trying to boot a Linux on a MacBook Pro.

@TB0ne: your post has exact balance between completeness and brevity. Thank you for having answered both my questions.

And thank you, TobiSGD, for the data.
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I think TBOne's statements are very reasonable and quite believable, though. But then, I'm in a predicament. For I live in a corner of the world and don't think getting a high-end optical drive should be easy here (Buenos Aires). And order it abroad would mean to expend more money in the shipment than in the product itself.

And of course, by the time I could buy a good drive, the state-of-the-art storage media will make CDs and DVDs obsolete. Regards.