Introduction

DVD burners are the hottest trend in storage right now. With the costs of the media dropping and the explosion of digital video cameras, it has become very easy for the average consumer to now generate their own video DVDs. The format wars are not as much of a problem now as roughly 75% of all drives available on the market are multiformat. This means the decision between using the - or + media is less of a concern. Compatibility of the media with the consumer players is a bigger issue that is difficult to test.

Plextor has been a big name in the field of optical storage over the years. Their PlexWriter line of CD burners were generally considered to be some of the best available, albeit at a fairly high price. With the introduction of the PX-708A, they are set to take the DVD burner market by storm.

Specifications

The Plextor PX-708A is an internal DVD multiformat burner. There are a few twists in its capabilities though that will be mentioned later in the review. For now, here are the specifications on the drive:

As for CD and DVD formats, it pretty much supports all disc formats currently on the market. The drive itself has a black tray that Plextor claims help reduce the number of C1 errors caused by jitter on CDs.

When 8x Is Not 8x

Here comes the most confusing part about the Plextor PX-708A. The drive is rated as being an 8x burner for DVD+R media, but the drive does this with a special encoding method on certain 4x DVD+R discs. What does this mean? It means that the PX708-A is able to perform exceptional speeds on more widely available and less expensive media. Many of the new 8x burners require the use of 8x media which is very difficult to find and will likely be quite expensive. The claims of 8x recording are tested below in the benchmarking.

Benchmarking

All benchmarks for the PX-708A drive were done with the Nero CD-Speed v2.11. This is a small application that tests the various features of both CD and DVD burners in reading and writing data. All tests were conducted on the following hardware and software configuration:

For testing the drive, the recommended media brand of Verbatim was used for the testing except for the CD-R testing, For CD-R testing, a TDK 52x CD-R media was used in its place. I was also unable to obtain 4x DVD+RW media, so 2.4x media was used in its place. Here are the results of the various media in CD Speed v2.11:

Based on the results, the PX-708A does a superb job on just about every media type. It does especially well with the CD-R media, giving dedicated CD-RW drives a run for their money. Many DVD burners currently lack performance writing to CDs compared to dedicated CD burners. Recording speeds were at or very close to their rated speed. This included the 8x burning on 4x DVD+R media. While it started out at a slower 6.0x speed, it quickly jumped up to the 8.0x speed.

Reading speeds were a bit more disappointing for the DVD media. In the case of the DVD media that had just been recorded, all of the discs were read at a slower 6x to 8x speed rather than the rated 12x speed for a industry printed DVD. This wasn't the case with the CD media that was read at the full reading speed even on the CD-R media.

Software

The Plextor PX-708A comes with a software package by Roxio that includes Easy CD & DVD Creator 6, PhotoSuite 5 SE, Drag to Disc for Windows and a 30-day trial of Dantz Retrospect. Of these applications, the one that will be most used is the Easy CD & DVD Creator 6. This allows for the creation of audio, video and data CDs and DVDs. PhotoSuite 5 SE is a photo editing application. Drag to Disc is a packet writing utility for using the RW media similar to a standard drive.

Video Burning

Since many people plan to use a DVD burner for creating video DVDs, I decided to test the drive's ability using the included Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 software package. Testing was done using a 45-minute video clip captured as MPEG1 from the ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9600 Pro video input which was converted to DVD through the Roxio application. To further strain the compatibility of the disc on a consumer DVD player, I decided to burn the video to a DVD+RW media that is often the least compatible media type.

The Roxio software was very easy to use and even allowed for the generation of simple DVD menus. Once I had imported the video file and creating the menu structure, I told the program to burn the DVD. Since it was only recording at 2.4x speed and it was an MPEG1 stream that needed to be converted to MPEG2 for DVD playback, the program had to take time to convert the video and burn it. Approximately 2 hours later, the disc was done.

The final test was putting the newly burned DVD+RW into an older Pioneer DV-414 player dating back to 1997. Surprisingly, the video was able to play without many problems. The video image was fairly good with a few artifacts in the picture likely caused by the MPEG1 to MPEG2 conversion. At a few spots, the DVD player also had some skipping, but I was still amazed that it worked on such an old player with the least compatible format.

Conclusions

Overall the Plextor PX-708A is a very impressive drive. While a lot of 8x drives will be coming out over the coming months, they will likely have a hard time competing with the performance of this drive. One of the best features is the 8x speeds on the older 4x media. This gives users the performance without the increased cost. There are limits to the type of 4x media that the drive can use at this speed though. CD performance was also outstanding. The drive puts out the performance near to many dedicated CD burners. Users will not have to sacrifice CD speeds for DVD functionality.

If there is one bad thing that can be said about the Plextor PX-708A is the less than expected reading speeds of DVD media. The packaging claims that it can reach 12x speeds for reading DVD-ROMs, but this apparently is only true for printed DVDs rather than the recordable media.