The LiteOn DH-4B1S is an all-round optical storage drive, supporting CD, DVD and BD media. Reading and writing speeds are not the top that you can find, but they are pretty good.

In detail, the CD/DVD/BD reading tests that we performed reported good results with smooth and fast reading processes. Also, Blu-ray movie playback was flawless, and any rewind/fast forward attempts were completed successfully without any problems.

Next up is error correction. Our tests with defective media reported that the drive's CD error correction mechanisms are good. As far as error correction with DVD media is concerned, the drive is also strong in correcting most errors; except the TDV-541 test disc, where the reading process failed as the drive was approaching the end of the first layer.

The drive's relatively slow recording (12x max) has allowed it to offer generally good DVD burnings, at least according to the ALMEDIO AEC-1000 analyzer. And we say that because you have to remember that errors are not "things". It is a manifestation of how well the total system (disc + player) is working. The disc itself does not have an error rate; playing the disc produces errors. Ideally, what you want is a disc that will play back on all players with a low error rate. Unfortunately, there are no standards for players, only for the discs. Therefore, each type of player will give different results.

After this small parenthesis, we may say that the recorded DVDs seems to be in a good shape. An exception should be the DVD-R DL disc, for which the Disc Speed utility reported uncorrectable errors. In contrast to the qualitative recording, the drive a few times failed to reach its maximum speed when using some specific MIDs. Hopefully, this will be fixed with a future firmware release.

CD recordings were performed at the drive's maximum speed and all the quality measurements look promising.

Blu-ray recordings were also finished at 2x and 4x as it was expected. All we have to say about this is that the discs were readable in the LiteOn drive itself (burner) as well as in any other Blu-ray drive we tried in our labs. LiteOn should definitely fix the drive's performance with the TDK BD-RE DL media. Both recording and reading tests were problematic.

To sum up, the drive proved to be a good Triple Writer, having many strong points. If you really need a Blu-ray burner, we would have no problem suggesting it. However, Blu-ray burners and media are still expensive for the mid-user and we are not sure whether you are ready to spend the $350 required for the LiteOn drive. ODD makers should further drop the prices of optical storage products in order to make their offerings more attractive, accessible and competitive, under the pressure of the aggressively priced memory and hard disk storage solutions of the market.