This external DVD writer looked pretty neat, in fact, it’s probably the best looking optical drive Lite-On have ever released. It's slim, sexy, and blue -- making it look feisty, being USB2.0 and all.
It seems that barely a month goes by without a new optical drive being unleashed from the renowned Lite-On factories. Most look rather ordinary, with beige being the standard colour, but they always seem to more than make up for it with their incredible performance, hardware boosting firmware updates and extremely affordable prices. This external DVD writer looked pretty neat, in fact, it’s probably the best looking optical drive Lite-On have ever released. It's slim, sexy, and blue -- making it look feisty, being USB2.0 and all.We found feisty was not the case performance-wise, however. Rated at 1x DVD-R and 2x DVD+R, this didn’t break any speed barriers; just negative sound barriers because it's extremely quiet.Whacking in a Verbatim 4x DVD-R, writing the Atomic DVDzilla™ (as per last month -- 4,478MB of two highly compressed zip files) in Nero, after downing 11 coffees and losing all sense of time, it finally completed a disc. In a painful 59mins and 34 secs. Yeek!As its DVD+R speed was rated at twice the speed of DVD-R, in went a Ricoh 4x DVD+R (with no Verbatim DVD+ available). It burnt an entire disc in the slightly-faster-yet-still-damn-slow time of 29mins and 9secs. These speeds were about right, but why must it be rated at such low speeds?It's slow. Agonisingly slow, but it's half-neat for the purpose it was built for -- a highly portable external DVD writer. Not a top performer, but extremely transportable. But what really let our love anchors loose was the stupidly, insane, skyrocketed price. For this amount, you could purchase a high performing DVD± writer, an external carry case and a year's supply of coffee beans. This is aimed at those with truly elite wallets who are happy to sever all ties with performance in favour of style and mobility.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012