PleXCombo PX-320A IDE DVD/CDR-W - Page 10

Conclusion

Leading manufacturer Plextor introduced a new combo drive, possibly a little late. The drive comes with all the latest goodies from Plextor labs, including BURN-Proof, PoweRec II, VariRec, Black tray and improved PCB circuit to reduce noise on written CDs. The Plextor drive supports high DAE ripping speed, un-problematic DVD playback, UDMA 33 support, complete retail kit and two years of warranty for the European customers. So far good...

There are several issues we encountered and will also trouble the possible buyer. The biggest problem is the limited media support, especially for the 20x recording speed. Plextor supports only few media manufacturers for the 20x recording speed. We understand this policy for higher recording speeds of 32x and 40x but is this policy reasonably to be applied to 20x? Also even the drive doesn't lower its DAE speed with scratched media, resulting to produced read errors. There isn't support for Mt. Rainier, a wanted feature nowdays.

As a combo solution, the drive should perform equally well in both CD/DVD formats. The drive's compatibility with the various DVD recordable formats is almoost perfect since the drive accepted without any issues DVD-R, DVD+R and DVD+RW media. We had problems with the usual DVD-RW test disc but since the drive accepted a brand new, we assume this isn't really a problem.

The price of the drive ($180-$190) is between buying a bare Plextor 40x CD-RW recorder and a Plextor 40x CD-RW + cheap DVD-Rom drive. There will be users who wish a one-package solution with good CD-R and DVD playback features. If you need a Plextor drive with the DVD reading capabilities, PX-320A it's the way to go. Looking for alternative solutions may come cheaper (Ricoh MP9200A) but you will have a hard time to buy the drive since Ricoh no longer produces it...