Holiday Shopping Roundup: Eight Dual Format Recordable DVD Drives

Plextor 708A

Currently, the Plextor 708A is “the” drive to beat. We had one of the first samples of this drive back in September and we were thoroughly impressed. Since we did a full review on the drive once before, we won't spend too much time beating around the bush here. Due to a newer firmware release (1.03), we will be running all of the benchmarks on the unit again.

Quickly, we will try to sum up some of the features of the Plextor 708A. Feel free to check out the full review from September if you would like a more indepth analysis. The bundled media with the drive is just average — a demo of Dantz Retrospect, Roxio DVDMax, Easy CD & DVD Creator and one DVD+R. (Compare this to Nu Tech's DDW-081, which comes with the entire SonicDVD suite). We found the documentation with the drive to be excellent. The 60-page manual is a clear indication that Plextor had ample time to prepare and QA this unit during production.

Plextor 708A DVD-/+R Drive
Interface	IDE
CD Write Speed	40X, 32X, 24X (CAV) 16X, 12X, 8X, 4X (CLV)
CD Rewrite Speed	24X, 16X (CAV) 12X, 8X, 4X (CLV)
CD Read Speed	40X Max (CAV)
DVD-R Write Speed	4X, 2X, 1X (CLV)
DVD-RW Rewrite Speed	2X, 1X (CLV)
DVD+R Write Speed	8X (Z-CLV) 4X, 2X (CLV)
DVD+RW Rewrite Speed	4X, 2.4X (CLV)
DVD Read Speed	12X (CAV)
Supported Modes	DAO / DAO-RAW 16 & 96 TAO SAO / SAO 16 & 96 Packet Write Multi-Session
Supported Formats	DVD+R (DAO, incremental, seq) DVD+RW (random) DVD-R (DAO, incremental, seq) DVD-RW (random) CD-R, CD-RW, CD-ROM, CD-DA, CD-ROM XA, Mixed Mode, CD Extra Photo CD, CD Text, Bootable CD, UDF
Access Time	CD: 130ms DVD: 180ms
Buffer	2MB

Not only does the drive boast 8X writing speed for DVD+R, but it also claims 12X DVD read speeds. As far as specifications go, this drive outperforms the Nu Tech DDW-081 with dual write capability. The access time is a little too high for DVD's, but we will get more into that later during the rest of the roundup.

We should also mention that we were very impressed with Plextor's PowerRec II technology. Even though all of the burners we are looking at today have some on-the-fly laser optimization, PowerRec II is probably the most promising.

The Plextor 708A uses the LC897490 chipset, which is identical to the chipset in the Sony DRU-530A. It will be interesting to see which drive has a more capable mechanical solution.

Unfortunately, our reigning champion is not perfect. Obviously, the DVD Access time is a little high, bitsetting is not (officially) supported and there have been quite a few reports of poor DVD-R compatibility. We have determined that the burner has no default strategies for cheaper media. Some of the media we bought online simply does not work with this burner (the cheap stuff; some disks we tried didn't even have MIDs!). On the other hand, the cheapest DVD+Rs that we could find burned quite well in this burner. We have always been impressed that the 708A sees 4X available write descriptors for 1X and 2X rated DVD+Rs. Does the 708A have enough to hold onto the crown against its most formidable competitor yet, Sony?