The DX-401S is aimed to those who would like to have a portable drive that would enable them to watch BluRay movies and/or read BluRay media in general. The LiteOn drive can be connected to any PC, anywhere and that's the greatest of its features. You can use it at home to watch a movie, at work to read BD data media and even on your friend's PC.

The drive's stylish casing will add a lot to its evaluation points, successfully pleasing the eye of every owner.

Data transfer between the PC and the drive is made through the USB2.0 interface, ensuring that all read-out data will arive on time, even when playing BD movies, whose bitrate can reach 45 MByte/s .

However, as it is with all kinds of optical storage, the integrity of the read-out data plays a big role in the whole scene. Error correction and hiding mechanisms have to be as good as possible, while high reading speeds are always appreciated. Let's move on to the test summary to see how the LiteOn drive performed.

CD/DVD/BD media reading was fast, justifying LiteON's official specs. DAE was also fast enough for your everyday needs. Exception to this good performance is the reading process of the BD-RE DL disc, which could not be completed. The drive also had some minor difficulties reading dual-layerd BD-R and BD-ROM discs, showing some fluctations in the reading speed especially of the second layer of the discs. Hopefully, this was not translated into problems in the picture in the BD-ROM movie playback test. The reproduction was flawless, for both single and dual layer BD movies. Seek times were also low and the movie refused to "freeze" no matter our attempts to push it to its limits by pressing the FF/RW buttons. Good job for the LiteOn drive.

The drive is also practically silent while reading any kind of disc. Of course, this has to do with the drive's excellent build quality of the external case.

The error correction mechanisms of the drive were mediocre. Reading of our artificially defective discs many times produced read errors. Furthermore, the drive was not able to read the ABEX TDV-541 and the ABEX TDV-841 test discs.CD error correction mechanisms were average, not successfully hiding potential noise in the generated audio stream.

To sum up, the DX-401S' performance was adequate. Very nice reading speed, but, on the contrary, mediocre error correction mechanisms. Liteon's engineers could also do some tweaking in the reading of BD-RE DL and generally BD DL media, in order to offer smoother readings. However, when you mix these up with its relatively low price, the drive becomes a good buy. It's one of the few BD player that can be bought for about $200~150, while maintaining a decent overall performance.