In House Review - TEAC CD-W552E 52/24/52 CD-RW

by **Ian** on Wed Jun 11, 2003 8:05 am

CDRLabs has taken a look at the newest CD-RW drive from TEAC, the CD-W552E. Featuring some of the fastest speeds currently available, the drive reads and writes at 52x and rewrites at 24x. The CD-W552E also has its share of features including buffer underrun protection, a 2MB buffer and support for the Mt. Rainier format.
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In this review we take a closer look at some of the features found on TEAC's new CD-RW and then see how it compares to some of the 52x writers from the competition. Does the drive deliver the performance and quality TEAC is known for? Is it the fastest writer around? You'll have to read the review to find out.

TEAC CD-W552E 52/24/52 CD-RW

As usual, if you have any comments or questions about this review or the TEAC CD-W552E, please post them in the forum by clicking the link below.

by **Ian** on Wed Jun 11, 2003 8:08 am

btw... Instead of WSES and the LTR-48125W, KProbe and a LTR-52246S was used to test C1/C2 errors in this review.

by **dodecahedron** on Wed Jun 11, 2003 11:48 am

Ian wrote:btw... Instead of WSES and the LTR-48125W, KProbe and a LTR-52246S was used to test C1/C2 errors in this review.

the Kprobe pics are small, and the text (in the box above the plots) is kind of hard to read.

i really like the beta CDSpeed pics.

by **Ian** on Wed Jun 11, 2003 12:37 pm

dodecahedron wrote:the Kprobe pics are small, and the text (in the box above the plots) is kind of hard to read.

Yeah, I had to shrink the image a little to make it more 56k friendly. It was there more as an example of what Kprobe looks like.

by **cfitz** on Wed Jun 11, 2003 2:16 pm

Ian wrote:Yeah, I had to shrink the image a little to make it more 56k friendly.

Three letters: PNG

A full-size, completely clear, lossless PNG at ~7 KiBytes is more 56K friendly than a fuzzy, reduced size JPEG at ~40 KiBytes. If you don't like PNG, GIF works almost as well: full-size, completely clear and lossless for ~11 KiBytes.

cfitz

by **dodecahedron** on Wed Jun 11, 2003 4:35 pm

Ian, i think you're going to have to switch over to PNG, just to have cfitz stop nudging you about it!

by **Ian** on Wed Jun 11, 2003 4:41 pm

Yeah, I know. :roll:

by **rdgrimes** on Wed Jun 11, 2003 7:47 pm

OK, let's gang up on him:

Ian's silly little image at 40kb:

big, beautiful PNG image at 10kb:

Nuff said.

by **dhc014** on Wed Jun 11, 2003 9:05 pm

While we're off topic let me point out that jpeg is still better for some types of pictures. If a picture contains no sharp edges, and many colors, jpeg will maintain quality with smaller sizes.

jpeg @ 11.8kb:

png @ 47.2kb:

It's a matter of knowing when to use which format...

by **cfitz** on Wed Jun 11, 2003 11:03 pm

rdgrimes:

If you combine the two parameters on one graph and reduce the color depth to 16, it shrinks to around 4 KiBytes.

dhc014:

Quite true. As a general rule of thumb, JPEG is better for photos, PNG for screen shots.

dodecahedron, Ian:

Sorry. I won't mention it again.

cfitz

by **eliminator** on Thu Jun 12, 2003 12:42 am

Congrats on 2000 posts dodecahedron !!

by **KCK** on Thu Jun 12, 2003 1:30 am

Ian:

Did you choose the color scheme for KProbe intentionally, or simply used the default one? For consistency with future reviews, it might help if the same scheme were kept. One popular choice is green/yellow/red for C1/C2/reading errors. Also note that Q-Check employs green/blue/red, whereas CD Speed diplays C2 in yellow. Thus green for C1 looks reasonable. The choices for C2 and reading errors are less critical, since you won't be using them much for good discs, but I would opt for C2 in yellow.

cfitz:

I also think that PNG and combined graphs should be used, since in most cases the C2 graph itself is vacuous. Apparently the color depth can't be chosen within KProbe, and other programs must be used to reduce it to 16. If this is true, maybe we could persuade Karr Wang to reduce the color depth to 16. I recall it as one of your early suggestions.

by **dodecahedron** on Thu Jun 12, 2003 4:04 am

cfitz wrote:dodecahedron, Ian:

Sorry. I won't mention it again.

we were only kidding mate!

all's cool

by **dodecahedron** on Thu Jun 12, 2003 4:05 am

eliminator wrote:Congrats on 2000 posts dodecahedron !!

thaks!

it is here!!!

by **Ian** on Thu Jun 12, 2003 8:23 am

cfitz wrote:dodecahedron, Ian:

Sorry. I won't mention it again.

It takes more than that to hurt my feelings. :wink:

Yeah, KCK. I just used the default colors.

by **Scour** on Thu Jun 12, 2003 11:06 am

Hello!

Again a Great review, Ian.

The Teac (from Asus) has a good writing quality, but it´s slow for 52x-speed

A friend has an Asus 4816 and he burns under Nero a 703MB-CD in 2:34

by **rdgrimes** on Thu Jun 12, 2003 12:02 pm

One good thing about the Asus 52x is that it writes lead-in and lead-out much faster than others, it's about 15sec quicker at any speed than my LiteOn drives.

by **eliminator** on Thu Jun 12, 2003 5:59 pm

btw, Ian - any news on the 52x32x52 Lite-On !?? :wink:

by **Ian** on Thu Jun 12, 2003 6:02 pm

eliminator wrote:btw, Ian - any news on the 52x32x52 Lite-On !??

What do you want to know?

by **eliminator** on Thu Jun 12, 2003 6:11 pm

Do you have it !? ... and how do you like it ? :wink:

by **Ian** on Thu Jun 12, 2003 6:36 pm

Yeah, I have it. I posted a picture of the drive a week or two ago.

I like it so far. Very similar to their 52/24/52 CD-RW. Right now I'm trying to figure out whether it uses CAV when packet writing.

by **eliminator** on Thu Jun 12, 2003 6:44 pm

Cool, thanks bud !

by **Scour** on Fri Jun 13, 2003 10:00 am

eliminator wrote:btw, Ian - any news on the 52x32x52 Lite-On !??

Any improvements except the 32x-RW?

by **Harrier** on Fri Jun 13, 2003 12:34 pm

I read somewhere that it's allegedly "softer" on the noise side.

by **Ian** on Fri Jun 13, 2003 5:28 pm

The drive does seem a little quieter. I haven't put the two drives side by side so I really can't say.

The 52/32/52 is smaller in size. If I had to guess, its about 3/4" shorter than the LTR-52246S.

In House Review - TEAC CD-W552E 52/24/52 CD-RW

In House Review - TEAC CD-W552E 52/24/52 CD-RW

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