NEC has introduced a new generation of 16X DVD burner, offering higher DVD-R DL speed at 6X instead of 4X that the ND-3540A has and DVD-RAM writing support. After the release of the new ND-4550 burner, a more recent drive was announced, the ND-4551A, with the only difference being the LabelFlash feature and the DVD-RAM 5X writing support. According to some rumours NEC's chipset would support 16X write/read with DVD-RAM media. A rather interesting addition for the optical market.

The new drive is a good CD/DVD reader with high supported speeds although increased seek times. The supported 48X speed for CD reading is the highest available in the DVD burner market while the 16X reading support for DVD+R and DVD-R formats, the 12X for the DVD+RW and DVD-RW and the 5X DVD-RAM are something you don't see with many burners. The only thing that detracts a little from the good image of the drive, is the low ripping speed for the DVD-Video format, which is about average. Speed is better though when it is combined with quality. The DVD error correction is very strong and all of our tested DVD media did not pose a problem for the NEC drive. In the case of CD error correction, the drive has nothing special to add, just a typical, average performance.

According to our DAE tests, the drive confirmed its 40X reading speed while it managed to produce a perfect score in the Advanced DAE Quality Test. Unfortunately, The ND-4551A belongs to those drives that failed to read both of our 90/99min test discs.

AudioCD protection, such as Key2Audio and CDS200, are not a problem for the ND-4551A which will playback and rip them flawlessly. The scene is different when it comes to games protection. If you are planning to get a drive to backup your favorite games, the NEC ND-4551A is not the drive of choice. We checked the drive's ability with Safedisc v2.9 protection and our NEC didn't manage to create a working backup while it proved to slow when ripping the same protection.

Keep in mind that the drive, at the time of this review, is flashed with the original firmware from the manufacturer and no other version was currently available. Moreover, the 48X CD writing speed is too high to expect high quality. Nevertheless, the NEC drive proved good on this with an exception in its performance with the Intenso disc where the Clover Systems utility reported too many errors. This is something that can be easily fixed with a newer firmware revision. However, we still recommend using speeds lower than 48X for better and safer results.

The writing speed for the DVD formats supported by the NEC ND-4551A are the highest available, except for 6X for the DVD-R DL format where Pioneer supports up to 8X. The burner also supports 5X DVD-RAM recording, but we would like also to test it at 16X, something we didn't, since there are no 16X DVD-RAM media currently available in the market. DVD writing with Nero reported increased burning times, especially when recording at 8X. Apart from this, according to Plextools and Almedio, the drive has very good DVD writing quality, although the CDSpeed reading graphs have a different opinion for the DVD-R format. In all cases, the reported error levels were rather low while the CDSpeed graphs with all the DVD+R media we tried were just fantastic.

*Update 12/12/2005
After close collaboration with NEC, who provided us with the appropriate firmware, software and media, we finally managed to test the LabelFlash Technology with the NEC ND-4551A. For more details visit this link.

So, concluding we could say that the drive has a good to very good overall writing quality and we hope any minor issues we had will be fixed as soon as possible with a newer firmware update.

One thing we noticed and we liked is the fact that NEC finally decided to add support for bitsetting of all plus formats. Using utilities such as DVDinfoPro, CDSpeed or even with Nero, the user can easily set the booktype for DVD+R, DVD+RW and DVD+R DL media to DVD-ROM. In the features list for the drive, we should also add its ability to measure media quality.

- The Good

- High DVD±r/RW reading speed
- 6X DVD-R DL and 8X DVD+R DL support
- Very good DVD error correction capabilities
- 5X DVD-RAM read/write support
- Can burn DVD+RW media at 8X, and DVD-RW media at 6X
- Supports audio protected discs
- Writing quality with most media

- The Bad

- Performance with 90/99min Audio CD's
- Cannot create working backups with SafeDisc protected games over v2.60
- Cannot overburn DVD recordable media

- Like To be fixed

- Writing quality with specific media

Retail Package
Reading
Error Correction
Protected Discs
Writing
Features