The LH-20A1S from Lite-On, supports 20X DVD writing speed, making it one of the fastest on the market. Having tested other 20X burners in the past, we were anxious to see the drive's capabilities and the quality of writing at 20X.

The drive is a good, steady reader with both CD and DVD media. It is also very good with defective DVD media. But it was very disappointing when it came to our CD error correction tests and does not appear to be a good choice for those old, scratched CDs. In contrast, it did very well with our array of defective DVD discs.

Proceeding on to writing quality, results with the discs we burned were a bit disappointing. The CMC Magnetics and Verbatim CDs were burned with excellent quality. But almost all DVDs produced POF (uncorrectable errors) and some were even unreadable with the LH-20A1S drive itself. There were of course some good burns but of the problem burns, a prominent characteristic was the out of limits Jitter and Radial measurements, so perhaps a little more fine tuning with the drive may be in order for Lite-On and hopefully a new firmware release.

Generally, the drive didn't leave us with the best impressions, although to be fair, it did come with a prerelease firmware( 9L03). When it comes to writing quality though, we should say that we expected more .... from Lite-On and the LH-20A1S.