When the Plextor 740A was released, we expected another traditional Plextor drive and we would have been satisfied. But it wasn't so. The Plextor 740A is not just another plextor drive. It's a whole lot more. Built on the same chipset from Philips as the BenQ drives, the Plextor PX-740A has become faster with added quality which doesn't just give us a good ripping speed, but also good ripping quality. The fastest DL recorder out there yet, with only 13:52 seconds for a full DL burn.

Speed is not an issue for the Plextor 740A as from the comparison tables throughout this review we saw that it can keep up with any of the latest release drives and not only keep up, but beat them as well, although the speed differences were negligible. It is a fast reader with CD and DVD media, both SL and DL. Its error correction capabilities have improved and actually gave some excellent results during the DVD error correction tests.

Audio Protected discs were no match for the drive's ripping mechanism, since it managed to rip and produce accurate backups of all inserted protected audio discs. Unfortunately, the drive did not differ from others as far as protected games are concerned, and the SafeDisc protected game in specific. The Plextor 740A did an excellent job with PSX and SecuROM media, but only managed to backup accurately up to v2.8 with safedisc protection.

Even though some of the graphs in the burning quality tests were not excellent, the overall burning quality of the drive will leave the end user satisfied. At 16X burning speed, the drive managed to produce some very nice burns, as well as at 8X burning speed, for both DVD+R/-R media formats. With +RW/-RW media, the drive gave some good results though not what we expected from the drive, having seen what it can do with the +R and -R media formats. Coming to DL media, the 740A will satisfy with its 8X burning speed for +R DL and 4X -R DL media support. As mentioned before, what we have here is probably the fastest DL burner on the DVD-Recording market.

Something we would like to add before closing is that while the package comes with Plextools included in its sofware suite, the drive itself cannot perform the Plextools Quality Scans. Moreover, while the drive supports the booktype change, this can also be done with the BenQ Booktype Management utility as well as the more traditional CD-DVD Speed and DVD Info Pro programs. Interestingly, DVD Info Pro recognises the drive as a BenQ drive when doing the booktype setting.

The price of the PLEXTOR PX 740A ranges from US$96 to US$116.

- The Good

• DVD-R DL support at 4x, and DVD+R DL support at 8x
• Very good CD and DVD error correction capabilities
• Supports CD-Text (reading/writing)
• Supports audio protected discs
• Good Single Layer DVD writing quality
• Fast DVD-Video ripping speed

- The Bad

• Cannot recognize 90/99min Audio CDs
• Cannot create working backups with SafeDisc protected games over v2.80
• Cannot overburn DVD recordable media
• Can only burn Verbatim double layer media at 8X

- Like To be fixed

• DVD-R DL bug (limits unused space).

Retail Package
Reading
Error Correction
Protected Discs
Writing
Features