Our Device Coordinator and Senior Reviewer Wendy Collins has written in the following complete news submit:
For the last couple of years, NEC (now Sony NEC Optiarc) have produced DVD burners, probably starting with ND-455x series of drives and continuing up to the AD-717x series, which although in most parts operated within the manufacturers specification, failed to produce the performance or writing quality of its main rivals.
Sony NEC Optiarc would appear to be right back up there with the ODD big guns, with their new series of 20x writing speed drives, the AD-720x/520x series. They are as fast as the Samsung SH-S203B and writing quality is as good as the legendary Pioneer DVR-112 series of drives.
Model line up:
- AD-5200 : 20x without DVD-RAM support (manufactured by Optiarc)
- AD-7200 : 20x with DVD-RAM support (manufactured by Optiarc)
- AD-7201 20x with DVD-RAM and LightScribe support (manufactured by Lite-On)
- AD-7203 20x with DVD-RAM and LabelFlash support (manufactured by Optiarc)
Liggy has already produced a series of patched firmware for the new drives (except AD-7201) with support for full bitsetting and can be found at the Liggy and Dee firmware page.
There are also a few threads started in the NEC/Optiarc forum, showing some excellent results with these drives, here (AD-7200) and here (AD-7203).
