As a leader in the industry, we've come to expect a lot from Plextor. Over the years, the company has introduced some of the world's fastest and most feature packed optical drives. As you can imagine, I went into this review expecting a lot from Plextor's new external "Super-Multi" drive. While the PX-810UF performed as expected throughout most of our tests, things like writing quality kept the drive from getting top marks in our review.
Like the LG drive its based on, the PX-810UF can write to both DVD+R and DVD-R media at 18x. At this speed, it took a little more than 5 minutes to burn an entire 4.7GB DVD. This level of performance carried over to our rewriting tests where the PX-810UF turned in some very goodtimes with DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM media. Writing to DVD±R DL media wasn't a problem for Plextor's new drive either. Thanks to its 10x writing speed, the PX-810UF took about 14 minutes to burn 8GB of data.
Finding compatible media really wasn't really an issue with the PX-810UF. The drive wrote to most of our test media at its rated speed or better, with a good portion of it working at 18x. The PX-810UF's writing quality was also fairly good with most of the DVD-R and DVD+R DL media I tried. However, with some DVD+R and DVD-R DL discs, the PI/PIF rates were higher than we'd like to see. Hopefully, Plextor can address this in a future firmware update.
Plextor's new "Super-Multi" drive also performed relatively well in our DVD read tests. While the PX-810UF's seek times were a little higher than some of the other drives, it was able to read single layer DVD-ROM's and DVD±R media at 16x. It also read DVD±RW discs at 13x and both DVD±R DL and DVD-RAM media at 12x, but slowed to 4.8x when reading DVD-Videos. While this doesn't have any effect on movie playback, there are faster drives out there if you want to backup your movie collection.
Reading CD's wasn't a problem for the PX-810UF either. In our tests, the drive read pressed and CD-R media at speeds as high as 48x and CD-RW discs at 40x. This level of performance carried over to our DAE tests, where the drive ripped audio CD's at 40x. When it came to writing CD's, the PX-810UF performed as expected. The drive turned in some impressive times with both CD-R and CD-RW media and its writing quality was quite good.
As a more consumer oriented drive, the PX-810UF lacks many of the advanced technologies found on Plextor's "Premium" DVD writers. Nevertheless, it offers a number of useful features like buffer underrun protection, bitsetting and support for both USB 2.0 and FireWire. The PX-810UF's case is also very well constructed. However, the cooling fan in the bottom can be a bit loud at times. Last but not least, Plextor tops all of this off with a great software bundle containing Roxio's Easy Media Creator suite.
The PX-810UF 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 $120.
| Plextor PX-810UF 18x DVD±RW/RAM |
|
| Features: Installation: Performance: |
9 9 7 |
| Overall: | 8 |
Highs:
- Writes to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 18x
- Writes to DVD+RW media at 8x
- Writes to DVD-RW media at 6x
- Writes to DVD+R DL and DVD-R DL media at 10x
- Reads and writes DVD-RAM media at 12x
- 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
- Good CD writing quality
- Includes Easy Media Creator 9
- Features both FireWire and USB 2.0 interfaces
- Supports bitsetting for DVD+R and DVD+R DL media
- Good documentation
Lows:
- Questionable writing quality with some DVD+R and DVD-R DL media
- Had a hard time reaching its rated speeds when reading pressed discs
- Reads DVD-Videos at only 4.8x
- Cannot set the book type of DVD+RW media
- Cannot do write quality testing
- Overburns to only 95:05
- Cooling fan is loud
- Expensive
