Plextor PlexWriter Premium 52x32x52x

We love this new Plextor Premium drive to bits, there's no doubt about that. Excellent read and Digital Audio Extraction performance have always been a hallmark of Plextor, and the Premium drive continues that proud tradition in our benchmarks. On the other hand, Plextor's drives have been known to be very fussy with the type of media used. But with the new Premium, Plextor seems to have done some significant media compatibility improvements into its firmware.

While it isn't the fastest 52x-write drive on the planet, we think that the trade-off in speed can be attributed to Plextor's attention to quality writing. And with the demise of Yamaha's CD-RW business, there is no other vendor that stresses so much on quality writing as much as Plextor now. That said, the Premium's re-writing capabilities were pretty astounding judging from the results in our series of burning tests. And that was done on a 24x CD-RW media, so it can only get better if we'd ran it on a 32x CD-RW disc.

The firmware featured in our unit isn't the finalized version that'll appear in the retail versions. But we were told that it'll be no more different than the final version, and our results attained with our drive will be very much on par with what we'll see in the retail units. So with such a good all-round performing writer that features some pretty cool technologies, and a fantastic bundle (the new PlexTools Professional is already worth your last buck on any day) to boot, Plextor may have been seen by critics as being arrogant by naming their new baby a "Premium" drive. But clearly the new PlexWriter 52x32x52x deserves this tag, because we believed that the Premium is definitely Plextor's best innovation to date yet, and arguably the best 52x-write category CD-RW drive we've the ever laid our hands on.

At an estimated pricing of S$230 (or lesser), the Plextor Premium may seem like an expensive investment as compared to drives from other vendors. But believe us, you can't go wrong with this drive and the chances of you regretting this purchase is only as high as pigs flying through your window.