LG GSA-5169D

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The LG GSA-5169D is one of two latest release external DVD Burners solutions from LG. Unlike the LG GSA-2166D (a review of which is to be released soon by CDRinfo), the 5169D does not support LightScribe technology. Of course, it supports all the well known media formats, being a Multi drive, at the fastest available speeds (excluding DL media where the max burning speed for -R DL media is still only 4X). But what makes the 5169D a unique release, is the "One Touch Rec" feature. Before going on to discuss this specific function, let's recap on the drive's performance.

As far as reading speed is concerned, the drive performed quite well. The 48X max supported reading speed for pressed media is the least one would expect from a latest generation drive. But the most impressive performance was with write once DVD media, where the drive supports a max speed of 16X, whereas most of the market drives only support up to 12X max with the specific media. With DL media, 8X was the max supported speed.

Unfortunately, the drive could not read our 90mins audio disc but could read the 99min. Ripping speed was satisfactory, compared with the other two external drives in our comparison.

In the Error Correction arena, the drive produced average to good performance with CD media, and good with DVD media. Note here, that with the ABEX TDR-841 DVD test media, the drive failed to read over the defective area, reporting read errors. This is a performance we haven't witnessed for some time now, especially from an LG drive, where we have been used to excellent error correction.

With protected media, the drive managed to achieve good results while reading the protected games discs but alas, the 5169D wasn't able to rip all the latest protected games. With audio CDs, performance was more or less the same, as the drive failed to rip the Key2Audio protected disc, but managed to rip successfully and at a fast speed, the CDS200 and CDS 200.0.4 - 3.0 build 16a protection schemes.

Moving on to the burning capabilities of the drive and starting with CD media, according to the first Plextools scans, we could talk about increased quality, as almost all of the five media burned reported extremely low error levels and no C2 errors whatsoever. But when we double check with the CDX quality check utility, the results were far from satisfying. None of the inserted media was awarded a pass grade, all resulting in a "fail". As far as DVD burning quality is concerned, we were pleased to see that most of the inserted media were burned at their certified speeds with a few exceptions. Note here, that the drive has a "liking" towards the +R media format, performing better with that format. What we didn't like, was the fact that the drive could not perform with certain DL media, as it can be seen in the pages of this review. With RW media, the performance was average as indicated by both Plextools and CD-Speed Q-check utilities.

No changes in the DVD-RAM scene, with the drive reading and writing at 5X, while with Nero, and WOPC enabled, the drive will fill a full DVD-RAM in 25+mins.

Bitsetting is also supported through the automated feature from Nero Properties.

Concluding, we will say a few words about the One Touch feature available with the GSA-5169D. With this feature, the user can capture video straight to a blank DVD disc, through the supported Composite Audio/Video or SVideo i/o connected to his VCR, Video Camera or other similar device. With the use of easy wizard or an advanced users interface, all facets of producing a DVD can be handled.

The price at the time of this review for the retail package was around US$160 from pricegrabber.com

- The Good