Samsung TS-H552U Burner - Page 21

Conclusion

Samsung's release, the TS-H552U, an upgrade of the H552B, proved to be pretty much the same as its predecessor, a really good drive. In the error correction arena, the drive's mechanism managed to read successfully all defective discs, producing smooth graphs. Fast DL ripping and ripping speed as a whole and really good cd writing quality. That's pretty much the outcome of this review in a nutshell. Moving on...

In the protected media section, the drive didn't do so well, in comparison with the other drives. Although it managed to rip all protected games successfully, it didn't manage to produce a 100% working backup. The performance with the SecuROM media was excellent while with the Safedisc and PSX, poor. With the Audio protected discs, the H552U did really well ripping and successfully producing a backup disc of the Aiko audio media, which among the three types of protection schemes tested in this review, is the latest and thus hardest to rip. The CDS200 protection could not be ripped or the disc identified by the drive.

Writing quality unfortunately isn't the strong point of the TS-H552U as it was for the H552B. Most media burned at good speeds, but did not yield good quality as can be seen by the graphs and scans in the previous pages. As for the DVD DL writing speed, well, the 5X writing speed, is, fast indeed, the fastest among all the DL burners, although the writing quality still remains poor in this case too.

Finally, as stated before in the review, the labeling on the retail box is very inaccurate, creating to the potential buyer an image which is not quite the truth. Unfortunately, I believe that this is something that can not be fixed, so I'll state here the inaccuracies between the labeling and the specs : Number one, is that the speed labels on the front of the retail package state that the drive can support up to 48X writing speed (while the specs, located on the side of the box, state the max writing speed is 40X), and number two is that the 32X max speed for CD-RW media on the front is the right value, while on the side of the box (specs) reports as max speed with CD-RW media, 24X which is a false value. No media are also included. Those are the reasons the retail package was given few stars, in comparison with other retail drives.

The price for the drive at the time of this review was around US$79 for the retail package and $65 for the OEM/Bulk version.

- The Good

• Excellent DVD error correction
• Very fast DVD writing speed.
• Can overburn up to 101mins
• Rip/Playback 90/99min AudioCDs
• Rip/Playback Key2Audio AudioCD protection

- The Bad

• Doesn't support DVD-ROM booktype for DVD+R/+RW/+R DL formats
• CD/DVD writing quality with specific media.
• Doesn't support overburning for DVD±R formats
• Cannot play/rip CDS200 AudioCD protection
• Cannot backup accurately up to v2.8x SD2 and newest protected titles
• Doesn't support Mount Rainier
• Doesn't support DVD-RAM
• The retail box labels and specs do not confirm each other.

- Like To be fixed

• Writing Quality
• Future firmware release on max cd writing speed

Retail Package
Reading
Error Correction
Protected Discs
Writing
Features