Conclusion

The Yamaha 2200E is the first drive that supports 20x writing speed with a different technological approach than the other competitors. The P-CAV technology is not the fastest writing technology but seems to produce the best quality because of its link-less design. The drive also arrives with impressive 8MB of buffer and of course "SafeBURN" anti-coaster system. Yamaha has now also a anti-coaster technology, thanks to OAK Technology's help, and from what we saw it works very well -just as good as BURN-Proof/JustLink/SimlessLink does. Another big and welcome improvement over the past is the 10x re-writing speed adoption, which in our tests was the best among the competitor drives. The 2200E series support DAO-RAW and reading of SubChannel data but fail to backup SD2 protected CDs.

So, are we talking about a perfect drive? Nope... The drive has specific weaknesses. We could list them but for us the most annoying are the strange slowdown after 65mins and the luck of overburning, which is there but not working. Of course those problems can be improved with firmware updates and this is also what Yamaha claimed.

The competition from Ricon is very strong, since the MP7200 is faster (in absolute writing times) and it's already in the market for almost one month. There are also 24x recorders coming in less than a month so the decision is difficult for the possible buyer. Each drive has its own pros (+) and cons (-) which must be examined carefully from potential users. We feel that Yamaha 2200E is a safe buy but as usual you will have to make your own conclusions.