The distinction between Production and Prototype programmers is whether they perform a second, low-voltage verification pass after programming. Both PRODUCTION and PROTOTYPE programmers do an equally good job of programming devices. The difference is that a PRODUCTION programmer will detect and reject more devices if you encounter a batch of marginal parts. These marginal devices will take a program, but may fail under low voltage operation. A production programmer does a better job of weeding these out.

QuickWriter programs devices to the same specifications as PRODUCTION programmers, but does NOT do an additional low-voltage verification, so it is classigied as a Prototype programmer.