The PX-750A we received from Plextor was the bulk, or OEM, version. While they were able to provide a copy of the software DVD, the drive did not come with anything else.
Physical Features:
The drive Plextor sent us for this review was manufactured in December of 2005 and had firmware version 1.01. It was also manufactured in China and had a TLA# of "0001".For this review we updated the firmware to version 1.02.
Like the PX-740A, the PX-750A is based on a drive design from BenQ. In this case, it's BenQ's "Super-Multi" drive, the DQ60. While the bulk version of the PX-750A lacks the "Plextor" and "PX-750A" logos, you can see that there are still a few showing off its support for DVD+R DL, DVD+ReWritable, DVD-Multi and Ultra Speed CD-RW media.
Below the tray you can see the PX-750A's single LED. Off by default, this LED lights up green whenever the drive is reading or writing.
The rear of the PX-750A is fairly straight forward. By looking at the picture below you can see the drive's IDE interface, power connector and audio output connectors.
Starting from the left of the IDE connection you'll see the jumper switch for master, slave and cable select. By default it comes set as master. Next to the jumper block is the analog audio connector. The connector on the far left is the digital audio output.
Technical Specs:
Most of the specs below have been taken from Plextor Europe's website and the manual that came with the drive.
| Plextor PX-750A 16x DVD±RW/RAM | |
| CD Write Speeds | 40x (CAV) 32x (P-CAV) 16x (CLV) |
| CD Rewrite Speeds | 24x (P-CAV) 10x, 4x (CLV) |
| DVD+R Write Speeds | 16x (CAV) 8x (P-CAV) 4x, 2.4x (CLV) |
| DVD+RW Write Speeds | 8x (Z-CLV) 6x, 4x, 2.4x (CLV) |
| DVD-R Write Speeds | 16x (CAV) 8x (P-CAV) 4x, 2x (CLV) |
| DVD-RW Write Speeds | 6x, 4x, 2x (CLV) |
| DVD+R DL Write Speeds | 8x (Z-CLV) 6x, 4x, 2.4x (CLV) |
| DVD-R DL Write Speeds | 8x* (Z-CLV) 6x*, 4x, 2x (CLV) |
| DVD-RAM Write Speeds | 5x, 3x, 2x, 1x (CLV) |
| CD Read Speeds | 40x Max |
| DAE Speeds | 40x Max |
| DVD Read Speeds | 16x Max (DVD-ROM Single Layer) 8x Max (DVD-ROM Dual Layer) 10x Max (DVD±R) 8x Max (DVD±RW) 8x Max (DVD±R DL) 5x Max (DVD-RAM) |
| Buffer Size | 2 MB |
| Access Times |
130 ms (CD) 140 ms (DVD) |
| CD Formats | CD-DA CD-ROM Mode-1 CD-ROM Mode-2 CD-ROM XA CD-Extra Video CD Photo CD Multi-Session Mixed CD CD-I CD+G CD-Text CD-R CD-RW |
| DVD Formats | DVD-ROM DVD-Video DVD-R/RW DVD+R/RW DVD+R DL DVD-R DL DVD+VR DVD-VR DVD-RAM |
| CD Recording Modes | Track At Once Disc At Once Session At Once Variable and Fixed Packet Write Multi-Session CD-MRW (Mt. Rainier) |
| DVD+R Recording Modes | Disc At Once Multi-Session Incremental Recording |
| DVD+RW Recording Modes | Sequential Write |
| DVD+R DL Recording Modes | Disc At Once |
| DVD-R Recording Modes | Disc At Once Multi-Border Recording |
| DVD-RW Recording Modes | Disc At Once Multi-Border Recording Restricted Overwrite |
| DVD-R DL Recording Modes | Disc At Once |
| DVD-RAM Recording Modes | Random Access Write |
More Features:
By looking at the picture below, you can see that Plextor's new DVD writer is identified as a "PLEXTOR DVDR PX-750A."
The Nero screenshot also shows that the PX-750A has a maximum CD writing speed of 48x and a 2048KB buffer. This buffer is backed up by Sanyo's BURN-Proof buffer underrun protection. Technically this isn't true, as the drive uses a chipset from Panasonic, not Sanyo. Along with support for the Mt. Rainier format, the PX-750A can also write CD-Text and overburn. Unfortunately, we were not able to test the drive's overburning capabilities as it would not recognize our 99 minute CompUSA media.
Using Alex Noe's Weak Sector Utility we were able to determine that the PX-750A is a "two sheep" burner. This means that the PX-750A is capable of backing up titles protected by SafeDisc 2, including version 2.51.
Here is a screenshot from Nero's InfoTool. This program queries the drive to see what its reading and writing capabilities are. InfoTool had no problems detecting the PX-750A's maximum reading and writing speeds, recording modes, buffer underrun protection and 2MB buffer.
InfoTool also shows that the PX-750A is an RPC-2 DVD drive. This means that the drive's region is stored in the firmware. The drive's region can be changed five times and after that it cannot be changed anymore. Unfortunately, a patched RPC-1 firmware is not yet available for the PX-750A.
While InfoTool gives us a quick glance at the PX-750A's features, DVDINFOpro provides a little more information on some of the drive's reading and writing capabilities. By looking at the screenshot above you can see that Plextor's new drive can read and write to DVD+R DL, DVD-R DL and DVD-RAM media.
The PX-750A also supports a feature called "bitsetting." While the drive automatically sets the book type of DVD+R DL media to "DVD-ROM", you can manually do the same with single layer DVD+R and DVD+RW media using CD Speed. This feature comes in handy if you have an older DVD player that has problems playing recordable media.
