Product Reviews

Not so long ago, even the best DVD writers were slow: writing a disc full of video meant spending up to 20 minutes staring into space and hoping that it would finish without errors. Fortunately, the last few months have seen leaps and bounds in DVD technology. We recently reviewed the first drives that could write at 8x. Now Plextor has gone one better still with the PX-712A, which can write DVD+R discs at 12x.

Installing the PX-712A is as simple as any internal disc drive can be. Plextor has included all the cables and screws you'll need. It has also thrown in an excellent software bundle, which includes Ahead's Nero 6 SE disc-burning software, as well as PowerDVD for playing video discs, and Pinnacle Studio 9SE for editing your own video masterpieces. Plextor's own PlexTools Premium suite of utilities is included too, but this will only be useful to a few expert users.

The main attraction of this drive, however, is the speed it offers.

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The PX-712A can burn at 12x on some 8x DVD+R discs (see Plextor's Web site for a list of which ones) and when writing at this top speed, the drive amazed us by hurtling through our test, writing a full video DVD in just 6 minutes 29 seconds. This is almost twice as fast as the fastest 8x drive we've seen until now. Results with DVD-R discs were equally impressive: the drive happily wrote at 8x to our 4x TDK DVD-R disc, finishing the test in just 8 minutes and 19 seconds.

The PX-712A also performed well in tests using rewriteable discs, where it can write to both DVD+RW and DVD-RW discs at 4x. Burning our test disc containing 4.35GB of small data files to a DVD+RW took 14 minutes 30 seconds, which is the best result we've seen using this kind of disc. The same test using DVD-RW media took the slightly slower but still impressive time of 16 minutes and 13 seconds to complete.

The PX-712A is the best DVD writer we've tested. If you want to burn DVD+R discs, it's the fastest drive available - in fact, it produced the fastest results we've seen for every type of DVD disc. Although it's not the cheapest drive, it has excellent software and a two-year guarantee - if it won't work, Plextor will collect it, fix it and bring it back.

If you want to burn DVD video to disc or archive very large amounts of data from your PC, it may be worth your while waiting for higher-capacity 'dual-layer' DVD drives to come out in the next few months. If you simply hate waiting around for your DVDs to burn, this is the drive to buy.