|
Features
Plextor drives are loaded with great features that are the result of their
unsurpassed quality. We'll briefly go over a majority of them, beginning
with its read/write capabilities.
The Plextor PX-716A is capable of reading and
writing to CDR media at 48x, which is currently the highest speed on
these multi-format writers.
The PX-716A is also capable of writing to both
DVD+R and DVD-R media at 16x.
Now, what's impressive about this drive, is its
ability to write to DVD+R double layer media at 6x. This is achieved by
upgrading the drive to the latest firmware release. High speed writing
support for DVD-R DL is said to be available sometime in March.
Considering double layer discs in this particular format are not yet
available, this is not really a concern.
Intelligent Recording is a new and unique
feature found on the PX-716A that provides the highest quality writing at
optimum speeds using just about any media on the market.
Basically, this technology is for those discs
that are unknown or unlisted in the drive's internal catalog. This
feature automatically checks the discs and develops a writing strategy for it.
GigaRec is certainly an interesting feature.
I guess the best way to describe it is to compare it to Optorite's exclusive
HD-Burn, which is capable of writing much more data than your standard 700MB
CDR can. I couldn't find much information on it, but it basically
ignores the maximum capacity that is present or encoded on a CDR disc and
compresses or develops a writing strategy to be able to write more data than
is normally supported.
PowerRec adjusts laser power and writing speed
to control the optimum settings for any particular disc. This feature
basically means that it will allow 16x writing to a select few quality 8x
DVD+-R discs. We'll see how well this really works when we test media
compatibly a bit later in this review.
VariRec is another great feature this drive
supports. Not only does it actually improve the quality of audio CDs,
but also allows the user to make changes to how the drive is to perform as we
will show you in detail in our features section of this review.
Finally, I would like to go over the SilentMode
feature this drive does include. This is basically a feature to further
quiet its operation. Using Plextor's included software, you can make
some changes to how the drive is to perform, such as the speed of the tray
mechanism and spin speed.
We will show you how a majority of these
features take a major role in the read performance of this drive in our tests.
Installation
As with any Window XP installation, the drive is
quickly recognized with no further action required by the user.
We used the very latest version of the excellent
Nero 6 Burning Suite. Nero InfoTool reported all supported features
correctly, with the exception of its CDR read speed. This drive supports
48x and not 40x CDR reading. Enabling 48x reading in PlexTools still
reported 40x max, which was quite odd. Also, our drive shipped with firmware
revision 1.03 but I quickly upgraded to their latest firmware which supports
6x double layer writing.
|
