Submitted by Scour and, on behalf of Spizz, by Da_Taxman they let us know that CDRLabs.com has finished their review of the long awaited Plextor PX-W4012A:
The Plextor PX-W4012TA has been really hyped up over the past few weeks. With most 32x writers not offering much more than the 24x writers when it came to writing speeds and features, 40x writers were supposed to be the answer. In most ways, Plextor's new powerhouse has lived up to the hype, offering the fastest writing and rewriting speeds around. In our tests, the drive was a good 10 to 20 seconds faster than the current crop of 32x writers. But before you run out and buy one of these, you should know that this speed doesn't come without a price. Right now there is not a lot of media that can support these speeds. Going out and buying whatever is on sale and expecting them to write at 40x isn't going to happen. It is possible to use media rated at a lower speed and rely on PoweRec to do its thing, but as we found in our tests, even then the results weren't always perfect.
The PX-W4012TA isn't just fast a fast writer, it's also very capable when reading CD's and extracting CD-DA. In our tests the drive had no problems reading CD's at 40x with all types of media, and is the first drive that has been able to read CD-RW discs at 40x. This, combined with its 12x rewriting speeds, make it a very good choice if you use a lot of CD-RW media. Like Plextor's other drives, the PX-W4012TA also excels when doing DAE. In our tests it did quite well, but did not lead the pack all of the time. Surprisingly, it also had problems in our scratched and dirty CD tests.
You can read the full review here. Don't forget to check out our own, just finished, review of the Mitsumi CR-480ATE
Source: CDRLabs.com
