The LiteOn 1673S is your everyday 16X/16X burner. It's a fast CD reader, supporting up to the maximum supported 48X speed. The DVD reading speed even though is not by any means slow, is not the fastest around either.

DVD ripping is nice, though the drive is not the faster ripper, while audio extraction reported good results, successfully ripping all protected pressed audio discs. On the other hand, protected games were not a strong point of the LiteON drive managing to make working backups of SafeDisk protected games up to v.2.8. In the error correction department, the drive did quite well, managing to successfully read all tested media and producing a total of 100 points result in the DAE quality test.

Even though the drive is a fast reader, it's not a quality CD writer. Burning CD media at the maximum supported burning speed of 48X, the drive produces poor quality burns, while when the burning speed drops, the quality rises. In the quality scan pages earlier in this review, you will notice the difference between the 48X burn and the 40X burn which was the best burn the drive could give using CD media. This leads us to the obvious conclusion that if the user wants quality burns, he/she must actually burn the media at lower than max speed.

The drive can make a full burn at 16X in almost 6 mins, both with DVD+R and -R media. Though the speed is somewhat satisfactory, the quality isn't. As most LiteOn burners are lacking in this area, the 1673S is no exception. Overburning isn't included in the drives capabilities as far as DVD media goes, while the Booktype setting which was LiteOn's biggest advantage is not fully supported now and can be only be achieved through the LiteOn Booktype utility. Last but not least, the 1673S proves to be a good DL recorder, successfully burning DL media at 4X and surprisingly with good quality for such high speed, always referring to the DL speed limit, which is currently at 6X.

The price at the time of the review for the burner was at around US$60.

- The Good

• Good DVD error correction
• Supports protected Audio discs (CDS200, Key2Audio)
• CD reading speed
• Can overburn 99mins CDs
• Region free utilities
• Can be used for DVD media error measurements

- The Bad

• Doesn't accurately backup SafeDisc2 v2.9x+ protected discs
• Single Layer media writing quality at 16X
• Doesn't support DVD overburning

- Like to be fixed

• DVD writing quality at 16X mostly
• CD writing quality at 48X

Retail Package
Reading
Error Correction
Protected Discs
Writing
Features