The PX-750A is Plextor's latest release into the optical storage market and a "bridge" product to future releases such as the PX-755A and 760A drives, which according to Plextor, will bring increased speeds in the DVD-Burner market for the DL and DVD±R media respectively. Now let us list one by one, all the important features and capabilities of the 750A drive and then grade the drive according to its performance in our tests.

In a nutshell, the PX-750A is not the usual Plextor drive that we have come to expect. The PX-750A is more of a downgrade of previous Plextor models and not an actual upgrade as it should have been. As a reader, it is as fast as any average drive and nothing particularly impressive with either CD or DVD formats. Although it reported good DAE quality results, the drive does not support Leadin/Leadout and reported a relatively low average DAE speed, in comparison to the LiteOn and BenQ drives. As stated earlier, DVD reading speed is nothing extraordinary and its performance can be described as standard. Note here that the drive does not support either 99 or 90min audio discs.

The error correction mechanism of the drive, is neither good nor bad. It stands somewhere in the middle, with CD error correction being average, and not posting as good results as we would like to see with either of our 721 and 726 test CDs, while with artificially defective media, the drive was average to good, although some times, the speed was on the slow side when trying to read over all defective surfaces.

Protected media produced some problems for the reviewed drive, which did not manage to produce a rip of the Sony's Key2Audio protected media. Both the other audio protected titles were ripped successfully however. Protected games ripping is not a problem as long as the protection scheme is not Safedisc, which is a major problem for the drive. After two hours, the drive had ripped less than 1% of the disc. As far as working backups of Safedisc protected games are concerned, this can be done only with versions prior to the 2.9.

The main flaw of the PX-750A drive is its writing capabilities, which is mainly due to the limited media list that the drive supports. As can be seen in the previous pages, many of the tested media were burned at lower than their designated speed, especially in the case of 16X media. The reported quality is average with most DVD SL media, while there were cases with good burns, but with most, the writing speed was 4X even though the media was 16X certified. DL writing quality is also not as good as expected, as reported by the quality checks carried out on the burned media. We hope that soon, a new firmware version will be released which will improve things

DVD-RAM burning was satisfactory, although with no improvements to previous technologies, while the "Write and Verify" strategy while burning with Nero cannot be disabled.

Last but not least, the bundled Plextools Professional. As we saw in the first pages of this review, the drive cannot perform any of the advanced functions offered by Plextools Pro, which leads us to wonder why include the Plextools Pro Pressed CD in the retail package in the first place....

- The Good

- 5X DVD-RAM read/write support
- Can overburn CD media up to 99mins
- Supports Booktype Setting Change

- The Bad

- Performance with 90, 99min Audio CD
- Cannot create working backups with SafeDisc protected games over v2.80
- Cannot overburn DVD recordable media
- Does not support Q-Check
- DVD writing quality
- Limited compatibility DVD media list

- Like To be fixed

- More media for 16X
- Writing quality with certain media

Retail Package
Reading
Error Correction
Protected Discs
Writing
Features