A good DVD burner for the price
Written: Apr 09 '04 (Updated Aug 23 '04)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
|
Pros: Pretty good value, many functions
Cons: Finicky about media and other system hardware
The Bottom Line: Good value and features if you have the patience to figure out its quirks.
|
|
|
| rwcat's Full Review: Lite On LDW-401S DVD+RW Burner |
I bought my Lite-On LDW-411S at Circuit City's after thanksgiving sale. It came out to $89.99 after the rebates. I have owned other Lite-On products and have been happy with those items so I decided on this model as opposed to some of the no-name or lesser-known brands available.
My system is a Pentium 4 2.53GHz running Windows 2000.
This burner is finicky. First, it didn't want to exist in my system with the Lite-On DVD-ROM. It also didn't like to co-exist with the Lite-On CD-RW either. I had to replace that with a standard Lite-On CD-ROM. I like having two CD-ROMs so I can listen to CDs and still access data on the other CD unit.
The software bundled with my unit (MyDVD by Sonic) is reliable but not versatile at all. It wants to re-encode every video file to maximum resolution which takes tons of time and DVD disc space. At the maximum resolution (8000 Mbit/sec video) you can only get one hour on a DVD. It is very strict on the media file specifications. The software doesn't use compressed audio, so you have to start sacrificing video quality if the total project exceeds about 2 hours.
My unit is rather picky about the blank DVD media I use. Although it is a dual format burner (+ and - R and RW) it hasn't been very successful at burning -R media. It doesn't like cheaper +R media either. I have been using Memorex +R and 4x, and that solved the media issues. Unfortunately, this happens to be just about the most expensive media available.
With quality +R or +RW media, this unit works great. It burns rather quickly at a true 4x, taking about 25-30 minutes for a complete DVD. The CD burner function works great. Not anywhere near as picky as the DVD burning. Although the unit burns CDs at 40x max, real-world testing is much slower. At 40x, it constantly has to refill the 2MB buffer which slows down the overall burn process, resulting in an average burn speed of about 11x. My testing of both data and audio CD burning results in faster completion at 16x rather than 40x. This is with no multi-tasking during the burn process.
The only other pet peeve I have is that the unit is slow to respond to the insertion of media, blank or pre-recorded. It takes quite a bit of time to figure out what has been inserted and for the computer to respond.
Overall for the price I am glad I bought it and I am enjoying it.
Update 8/23/04:
I recently updated the firmware for my DVD-RW drive and it seems to have helped increase compatibility with DVD playback in by stand-alone DVD player. Lite-On also has a tool to change the book type to DVD-ROM which I have been using successfully for about three weeks so far.
I also increased the read and write speed of the CD functions of this drive. I disabled my ASPI drivers, which I installed manually some time ago, since Windows 2000 doesn't have resident ASPI drivers. This GREATLY increased both the CD write speed and audio extraction (ripping) speed. It also increased the speed that the unit reads DVD-ROM.
After these recent changes, I am even more happy with this unit.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 89.99
Operating System: Windows
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
rwcat
|
|
Reviews written: 24
Trusted by: 1 member
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.