New Plextor drive announced in Japan

Plextor announced that they will release a new drive called the Premium2u and as the name already says its a external version of Plextors Premium2 CD-R drive. According to Plextor it will hit the store shelves beginning of June.

Sorry to shit all over this parade, but if the Premium2u doesn't support Firewire, then I would rather have the Japanese package for the internal model, then just buy an external enclosure separately. It's not that I 'need' the Firewire throughput for CD burning, but that I don't like the bus aspect of USB. If Plextor can give Firewire to the PX-716 and a bunch of of the rebranded DVD drives that came out later on, they shouldn't have any problem giving Firewire to the Premium2. I would almost bet money that the Premium2u is using the same external enclosure as the Premium-U, but with some logo/printed differences.

Plus if you care about appearance, then it's already common sense that the Premium2u is only going to have one bezel, and it won't be any better than the Japanese black bezel already is (the Premium2u might even have a not-as-cool-looking font). I think a silver bezel would look nice in a Premium-U type of enclosure, but I wouldn't get my hopes up about that. Not only might we not get silver, but we might not even get black either. I have seen official PX-760UFs, and they just slap a white-bezel drive into the same dark enclosure that a bunch of fake Plextors have been using ever since the PX-740.

Thanks to Koba for reporting this find.

Apparently it's a black case with a black-bezel unit:
http://www.plextor.jp/pc/download/catalog/premium2u.pdf

As for Firewire: Yes, that would have been nice. But Plextor DVD writers have always been more expensive than other brands and putting them into USB/FW enclosures has made them even more expensive. Now the Premium2 is even more expensive than the already expensive DVD writers. Can you imagine the astronomical cost of such unit when put in an USB/FW enclosure (at least compared to the other cheap crap that is available)?

I guess Plextor figured that the "n00bs" that can't put a drive in an enclosure themselves are perfectly OK with USB only and reducing the cost would maybe sell a couple of extra drives to them.

Picture of the new PremiumU2.
http://av.watch.impress.co.jp/img/av.../plex.jpg.html
Price according to Impress will be around Yen 19980. The Premium2 is still available new for Yen 19980 at computer stores in Akihabara and for Yen 19950 at Plextors online store. So there shouldnt be a big price difference.

What's really sad is that from this angle, the enclosure looks like an I/O Magic.

Would this be better than a pxq840u or equivalent? I'm really interested. Can anyone explain some of the features? I'm a bit computer illiterate.

Thanks Koba, I am really interested, please keep us updated.