Writes CD-ROM Modes 1 and 2, CD-XA Form 1 and 2, CD-DA, CD-I, Video CD & Photo CD. - Creates Audio CD, CD Extra, Enhanced CD, Photo CD, CD-I & Video CD Titles.

Supports Disk-At-Once, Track-At-Once, Multisession, Packet Writing modes.
Wide CD-R and CD-RW media compatibility (74min and Type80 - 79min)

Includes PlexTools V1.12

Feature Explanation:

Burn-Proof Technology:

We cannot imagine any writer anymore which hasn't got any buffer underrun protection system. The annoying thing of having your discs f*cked Up by the slightest mouse click is gone forever. However Burn-Proof has been modified and tweaked according to performance.

According to book-standards Burn-proof technology shouldn't give any problems or alter the quality of a recorded disc. In short words , burn-proof is a must have. The technology consists of the fact that when an buffer underrun is likely to occur (eg. 10% buffer status) the Plextor stops writing at a certain point. The buffer is filled again and in the meanwhile your Plextor determines the last position written on the disc. If the buffer is full again the Plextor continues to write the disc starting from the position were it last stopped the writing process.

Z-CLV:

As you can see Z-CLV doesn't write the disc all the time at 40x. Since it starts writing at the inner circle whereas the track density is much higher than the outer areas of a disc writing performance is of ery high importance. It is because of this reason that the drive starts at 20x in the inner circle and increasing the speed during the writing of the disc several times.

VariRec:

This technology is there to let you tweak the laserpower during an audio-recording. One of the most frequent things is that certain media isn't playable in car hifi-systems andso. Altering the laserpower could help a lot. Only to use when you are experiencing problems because the default setting is most-likely the best setting for your drive.

The default setting should give you the best quality result , because these are the optimum settings for the plextor for the used media. The default setting for a certain type of media was aquired in the testlabs from Plextor.

PoweRecII:

This technology is brandnew and it might be annoying for some people, but for most of us it gives us the optimal result. Due to powerrecII it might (will) happen that you use media which is certified at 40x but then again when we actually try to burn at 40x it seemed that the writing has been done at 24x.

This is all due to PoweRec. This is a database of parameters given to certain media in order to prevent the user from having bad burned discs. This means that the result you are getting is normally always good.

For example if you are trying to burn a 16x disc at 40x the result would most likely not be good. It would contain a lot of errors because the media wasn't made for being written at 40x. But hey, 16x media is most likely cheaper than new 40x media so a lot of people will write on such a disc.

So now with PoweRecII you have a help that will prevent you from having coasters and badly written discs. Since Plextor cannot test all media in the world , discs that are not in the powerrecII database will be given a standard parameter. So that is the reason why many of your disc's won't be written at 40x even if it is stated on the disc.

A possibility might be that in a future firmware release Plextor has tested your favourite media and integrates the optimum settings in PoweRecII. So it is very important to always update the firmware to get the best results.

On the next page we will take a look at the improved PlexTools that comes with this drive.

Introduction

Software: PlexTools

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Reactions on this item

Posted by 123456789 on Monday 22 April 2002 21:28

We would like to see an option to switch poweRecII off in order to try and burn at 40x regardless the media

This is NOT negative, it's a precaution.
Why switch something off that is a great help for the right burning speed.

So it's a 100% score!!

Posted by roadworker on Monday 22 April 2002 22:29

Nice review....

Just 1 thing to add:it's obvious that the reviewer didn't use the best settings to get the quickest reading time for the LiteOn and safedisk 2...
Why?To make the Plex look better???

Posted by Fishbutt on Tuesday 23 April 2002 08:59

Heh, and I bought one today before even reading this review. I bought the us version with TLA#0000, firmware 1.00 and made in Feb 2002. I was going to look for anything referring to the firmware flashes and disabling the sd2.5+ backups. There was a rumor(?) about a previous plex burner that supposedly disabled that "feature" and made it so you couldn't reverse flash to a previous firmware version. I want to be sure of this BEFORE I flashed it to whatever the bios is up to now for it. I will go and look for plextools 1.13 tho...

My tests with cdda99b showed it's speed very good but it had to slow itself down a few times. CDSpeed tho, gave a constant reading. Plus I tried a brand new pressed music cd I got about a week ago (the first one was a few months old so it might of been dirty or something) and the results were great! I'll post some of the cd speed results shortly...

Posted by louiskhorweiwu on Tuesday 23 April 2002 15:18

any chance you did tests for reading damaged discs? scratched etc? very useful and was in other reviews, hope it gets included/ kept in mind for future reviews...

Posted by Fishbutt on Tuesday 23 April 2002 21:21

Before I read louiskhorweiwu's reply, I was already going to test the plex to see if it could read a scratched disc better than my previous drives. Those were a TDK VeloCD 12x10x32 which was one of the earlier models that was a repacked plex and a Pioneer dvdrom dvd-104 slot drive. Both of those drives could not read that disc without reporting errors. The plex 40x went through it fine, although not screaming through it like it normally does. Here's the clonecd log of the cd in question. The cd was "on the floor at the boutique: mixed by fatboy slim." It's a 2 session disc with audio and a video. I'm running a test on a really bad data cdr that someone gave me to try and read that looked like it was dropped on the asphalt outside. It used to be guarenteed to lock up the box anytime you put it in. Clonecd is running pretty slow but it's not locking up the pc yet. I'll post those results when they are finished.

Posted by Fishbutt on Tuesday 23 April 2002 21:22

I 3:01:34 PM CloneCD Version 3.3.4.1 started!
I 3:01:34 PM ElbyCDIO Driver 3.3.3.1
I 3:01:34 PM ElbyCDIO.dll 3.3.4.1
I 3:01:34 PM CCDDriver.dll 3.3.4.1
I 3:01:34 PM ElbyECC.dll 3.1.0.0
I 3:01:34 PM Searching for SCSI/ATAPI devices...
I 3:01:34 PM Device Scan found 1 CD-ROMs and 1 CD-Writers!
I 3:01:34 PM Registered to:
I 3:02:24 PM Starting copy from PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W4012A to H:My

Musicfatboy.ccd
I 3:02:24 PM Read SubChannel Data from Data Tracks: No
I 3:02:24 PM Read SubChannel Data from Audio Tracks: Yes
I 3:02:24 PM Fast Error Skip: No
I 3:02:24 PM Don't report read errors: No
I 3:02:24 PM Intelligent Bad Sector Scanner: No
I 3:02:24 PM CD contains CD-Text: No
I 3:02:24 PM Reading Track 1... (Blocks 0-12512)
I 3:02:47 PM Reading Track 2... (Blocks 12512-28571)
I 3:03:14 PM Reading Track 3... (Blocks 28571-37890)
I 3:03:29 PM Reading Track 4... (Blocks 37890-52144)
I 3:03:53 PM Reading Track 5... (Blocks 52144-63512)
I 3:04:12 PM Reading Track 6... (Blocks 63512-83852)
I 3:04:46 PM Reading Track 7... (Blocks 83852-99550)
I 3:05:12 PM Reading Track 8... (Blocks 99550-120409)
I 3:05:47 PM Reading Track 9... (Blocks 120409-141819)
I 3:06:22 PM Reading Track 10... (Blocks 141819-155740)
I 3:06:46 PM Reading Track 11... (Blocks 155740-169389)
I 3:07:08 PM Reading Track 12... (Blocks 169389-187623)
I 3:07:39 PM Reading Track 13... (Blocks 187623-198718)
I 3:07:57 PM Reading Track 14... (Blocks 198718-209953)
I 3:08:16 PM Reading Track 15... (Blocks 209953-229028)
I 3:08:48 PM Reading Track 16... (Blocks 229028-244683)
I 3:09:14 PM Reading Track 17... (Blocks 244683-264302)
I 3:09:46 PM Reading Track 18... (Blocks 264302-274862)
I 3:10:04 PM Reading Track 19... (Blocks 274862-302227)
I 3:10:49 PM Duration of operation: 00:08:24
I 3:10:49 PM Reading Track 20... (Blocks 313627-330513)
I 3:10:58 PM Duration of operation: 00:00:08
I 3:10:58 PM Reading finished!

Posted by Fishbutt on Tuesday 23 April 2002 21:29

The way that music cd was scratched was from this...

Look at the inside of a cd jewel case. The tiny "fingers" that are in a circle arrangement that grab onto the hub of the cdrom, that's what scratched it. Apparently, the cd slipped out of the jewel case slightly and it was still 98% shut. The cd hub holder scraped across the surface of the cd pretty good. Good enough to make any audio cd player that it was put into skip alot. As you can see, it went through it without reporting errors! Whoopee! I just saved an old cd that I thought that I'd have to buy another because this one was accidentally damaged!

Posted by lanky on Wednesday 24 April 2002 04:48

The review looses 1 point for a rather obvious error:

On page:
http://www.cdfreaks.com/document.php3?Doc=74&Page=12

I quote:
"The result shows that the PX-W4012TA initially begins the writing at 16x whereas it changes speeds after 6 minutes to 24x and after 16min to 32x an finally after 58min to 40x. The overall average writing speed is 29.88x."

The part:
"initially begins the writing at 16x" is wrong. If you look at the picture it starts at 20x!! Please rectify.

Posted by PieterViljoen on Thursday 25 April 2002 19:38

Note: Please be aware that PlexTools 1.12 (as shipped and downloadable)is NOT compatible with Windows XP! This notice appears on the autorun dialog of the software CD.

Posted by on Thursday 02 May 2002 02:27

Great review , but get the names and serial keys out of the screenshots.

Posted by qbfabar on Thursday 27 June 2002 20:54

Very good review.
Why not include in the audio protected test programs such as Feurio and EAC which have proven even better than Plextools in copying protected audio cds ?

Posted by on Monday 08 July 2002 11:50

NO MOUNT RAINIER??? No mention being made of Mount Rainier support, or lack of it in the review article? Looked at the specs as well on the plextor site, and again no mention of it. Surely this should be a negative point.

Posted by on Thursday 22 August 2002 19:59

I bought one yesterday before reading this review...it definetely blows my old burner away(it burned a whole 700Mb in under 5Min) but Im having trouble burning anything past 80Min or 700Mb still,both with 700Mb media, and 800Mb media...

Posted by on Tuesday 07 January 2003 17:49

http://www.plextor.com/english/news/Mt.%20Rainier.html This is Plextors page on this subject and here it is in a nutshell.
Plextor PX-4012TA and PX4012TU drives are Mt. Rainier 'ready". Once Mt. Rainier is stable, a firmware upgrade will be offered at a later date to make the drives Mt. Rainier compatible. Future Plextor drives will be Mt. Rainier-compatible on release.

This review was very helpful I give it a 99%

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