The PX-740UF is a lot like its internal counterpart, the PX-740A. Designed with the cost conscious consumer in mind, this stylish, BenQ DW1640 based drive delivers impressive performance without all the bells and whistles found on Plextor's PX-716 series of drives.
Like its BenQ counterpart, the PX-740UF can write to both DVD+R and DVD-R media at 16x. At this speed, it took the drive about 6 minutes to burn an entire 4.7GB DVD. Plextor's external DVD writer also did pretty well in our rewriting tests, turning in some very good times with both DVD-RW and DVD+RW media. Even more impressive was the PX-740UF's DVD+R DL writing performance. Thanks to its 8x writing speed, the drive took less than 15 minutes to burn an entire 8.5GB DVD. Unfortunately, its 4x DVD-R DL writing speed also put it at a slight disadvantage in some of our tests.
When it came to media compatibility, Plextor's external writer gave us some mixed results. While the drive wrote tomost of our test media at its rated speed, it would not write to any 8x DVD±R media at 16x. On the other hand, the PX-740UF's writing quality was, for the most part, pretty good. However, there's still room for improvement, especially with Optodisc's 16x DVD+R and Daxon's 16x DVD-R media. Hopefully Plextor can tweak this in a future firmware update.
The PX-740UF also performed relatively well in our DVD read tests. While it came up a little short of its rated speeds, the drive was able to read single layer data and video DVD-ROM's at speeds as high as 15x and had some pretty good seek times. The PX-740UF also performed pretty well with other types of media. In our tests, it read DVD±R discs at 15x and both DVD±RW and DVD±R DL media at an impressive 12x.
Reading and writing CD's wasn't a problem for the PX-740UF either. In our tests, the drive had no problems reading pressed and CD-R media at 48x and CD-RW discs at 40x. The drive also did well in our DAE tests, reaching speeds as high as 48x. This level of performance carried over to our writing and rewriting tests. The PX-740UF turned in some impressive times thanks to its 48x CD-R and 32x CD-RW writing speeds and its writing quality was quite good.
As I mentioned before, the biggest difference between the PX-740UF and Plextor's previous DVD writers is the number of features. While the drive offers things like buffer underrun protection, bitsetting and support for both USB 2.0 and FireWire, it lacks many of Plextor's more advanced technologies like Q-Check, GigaRec and Autostrategy. The PX-740UF doesn't come with a lot of extras either. To keep costs down, the manual is on the CD and instead of Roxio's Easy Media Creator, the drive comes bundled with the Nero 6 suite.
The PX-740UF is available now and can be purchased through some of the online vendors listed on Pricegrabber. Prices vary depending on the seller, but Plextor's new external DVD writer can be picked up for around $150.
| Plextor PX-740UF 16x DVD±RW |
|
| Features: Installation: Performance: |
9 9 8 |
| Overall: | 9 |
Highs:
- Writes to DVD±R media at 16x
- Writes to DVD+RW media at 8x
- Writes to DVD-RW at 6x
- Writes to DVD+R DL media at 8x
- Writes to DVD-R DL media at 4x
- Reads single layer DVD-ROM's at 16x
- Reads DVD±R media at 16x
- Reads DVD±RW and DVD±R DL media at 12x
- Features 48x CD-R and 32x CD-RW writing speeds
- Very good transfer speeds with all types of CD media
- Excellent DAE speeds
- Good CD writing quality
- Includes buffer underrun prevention technology
- Supports 99 minute media
- Good selection of writing and rewriting speeds
- Includes software from Nero
- Supports bitsetting for DVD+R/RW and DVD+R DL media
- Good documentation
Lows:
- Does not perform to spec with all FireWire/USB chipsets
- Cannot write to 8x DVD±R media at 16x
- Cannot do write quality testing
- Has a 2048KB buffer
- Does not include a FireWire cable
- Still expensive
