After the release of the new firmware, v1.02, for the PX-755A and SA, the drive retains its good error correction capabilities without however changing anything in the reading part, while the maximum supported speeds for CD and DVD media remain at the same. The booktype feature is still the same, supports bitsetting for DVD+R and DVD+R DL but not for DVD+RW. The default for this format is still the DVD-ROM. Feature rich is what gives a big advantage to the Plextor PX-755 drive.

This time round, we selected to burn all the media we tried with the AUTOSTRATEGY feature enabled, set to Auto Selection Mode. According to Plextor, the drive will select the best writing strategy, whether it is located in the AS Database or in the firmware database. If no suitable strategy is found, AUTOSTRATEGY will create one, an optimised strategy in the AS Database.

The writing quality still needs further improvement. In comparison to the results we got from our scans in our previous review with the PX-755A with fw v1.00, the new fw, v1.02, improved the writing quality in a few cases whilst in others, there was no change. For example, we got better writing quality with BenQ DVD+R 16X media while worse with Optodisc DVD+R 16X.

The tests we performed with the AUTOSTRATEGY feature, showed us that this function sometimes works, while sometimes it doesn't. For example, it did improve the writing quality with Traxdata DVD+R 16X, when we selected to create a new strategy, but it had no effect with the three other discs from Datasafe, Datawrite and Prodisc. So, we cannot say that it is anywhere near 100% effective.

In conclusion, the drive when flashed with v1.02 fw, is generally a good burner but this highly depends on the inserted media. We had very good results with many discs, from different manufacturers, although in some cases we got numerous errors. The performance with DVD+R DL media is something that should be improved, since we had two out of two unreadable discs. So, we would like to see some improvements in the next firmware release.