Our friends from
CDRLabs.com have posted a new review on their website yesterday. This time
they've taken an extensive look at the AOpen
COM4824 combo drive. As the model number of the AOpen drive suggests, it
supports 48x CD-R and 24x CD-RW recording speeds. The drive can read CD media
also at 48x while DVD media can be read at 16x maximum. Here's part of
CDRLabs.com's conclusion:
 The COM4824's writing performance isn't up
to the same standards as its reading performance. It couldn't write a
significant fraction of the tested media at its rated 48x speed, and burn
quality was below par on a number of discs as well. More troublesome is
the COM4824's rewriting performance. Although it can write CD-RW discs at
high speed, it can only read them at a lowly 34x. Even worse is the
COM4824's packet-writing performance, which is nothing short of dismal.
Finally, although the drive is relatively quiet at high speeds, it isn't
smart enough to trim back those high speeds when playing back CD audio and
DVD video discs. Thus, it is noisier than it needs to be, and noisier than
other drives, when it comes to multimedia playback.
Still, the AOpen is worthy of your consideration depending on your
intended usage. And with a street price in the $ 50 range at the time of
this review, it represents a decent value for a combo
drive. |
Overall the AOpen COM4824 combo drive gets a score of 7 out of a possible 10.
If you're in the market for a cheap combo drive then don't forget to check out
the complete review here. You're welcome to use our Recording Hardware Forum for questions related to combo drives
such as this AOpen model.
Source: CDRLabs.com
