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LITEON SOHW-832S and SOHW-1213S DVD Burners

Today we take a look at two of the newest DVD burners from LITEON. Both of these dual format burners offer excellent options with great burning and reading speeds. To preface this review, we are not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of these burners. We are not going to spend countless hours benchmarking and testing different media types and brands. Instead we have used these DVD burners as you our reader would use them. We use them for backing up data and creating home movies. We use them for burning CD-Rs. We use them to watch movies and play games. Now we are going to tell you about these drives and what we liked and what we didn't like and whether it's worth upgrading your system with one of them. If you would like a more in-depth analysis of these drives, please visit www.cdrinfo.com.

• SOHW-1213S Technical Review
• SOHW-832S Technical Review

Company:

LITEON, www.liteonamericas.com

The Burners

Getting Started

SOHW-832S

When you open up the box on the SOHW-832S, you will find the familiar LITEON bezel with the various DVD format logos printed on the tray. And as always an earphone jack and volume control is located on the lower left corner of the drive. The drive comes bundled with Power DVD 5 and Nero OEM Suite which features Nero Express authoring software. The drive did not ship with an IDE cable.

When it came down to using the SOHW-832S we were not disappointed. Seek time or disk access time was average for both CD-rom and DVD-rom. Not stellar. Ripping speeds were fast and quality was excellent. We didn't find any glitches in ripped files. This is the first ever LITEON recorder that supports DVD+R DL writing. The new format has been highly awaited from many users as an alternative medium for storage. As with any drive utilizing this feature, it's a slow process, but well worth the wait for the added space. Now you can backup a movie without compression or other tactics which can reduce quality. Or you can back up a large portion of your files on one disk. As a test I backed up a portion of my personal music collection that I have converted to MP3s. Now if I lose a harddrive or need to reinstall my OS, I can quickly re-add my music from these large double layer DVDs. DVD+R DL writing worked like a charm and when the initial media prices drop, many users will enjoy it.

Pros:

• Lower priced compared with other DVD+R DL recorders.
• Good DVD writing quality for DVD+R and DVD-R media.
• Double Layer capability adds a lot storage options.

Cons:

• With the high cost of double layer media, some users will not utilize this feature at this time.
• Does not support reading of DVD-RAM media.

SOHW-1213S

The SOHW-1213S bezel looks almost the same as the SOHW-832S. The only real difference is the SOHW-1213S does not have the DVD DL logo printed on the tray. This drive also comes bundled with Power DVD 5 and Nero OEM Suite which features Nero Express authoring software. The drive also did not ship with an IDE cable.

The SOHW-1213S is the first LITEON recorder to include the 3rd generation MediaTek chipset, allowing up to 12X DVD+R. This 12x burning on DVD+R media and the lack of double layer burning are the only real differences between the SOHW-1213S and the SOHW-832S. We experienced similar results in access times, ripping speeds, and burn times with both drives. Initially we experienced a few issues trying to burn at 12x, but a firmware update from LITEON seemed to correct any issues we were having in testing.

Once again, we feel that the LITEON SOHW-1213S has proven itself as a great alternative if you are seeking quality yet affordable optical storage drives. If double layer technology is not a feature you need at this point, but want fast burning speeds, the LITEON SOHW-1213S is definitely worth your time.

Pros:

• Low Price.
• Ripping speeds were excellent on both CD and DVD.

Cons:

• Does not support double layer burning.
• Does not support reading of DVD-RAM media.

Adding It All Up

Both the LITEON SOHW-832S and SOHW-1213S are affordable dual format DVD writers that you should consider when upgrading your system. Each offers the quality at affordable prices the LITEON continues to put forth into the market. First they brought us inexpensive CD burners. Now they bring us inexpensive DVD burners. Sure you can probably find drives out there that burn a little faster, but for the few seconds it will gain you, it's not worth the money.

Another consideration is support. LITEON is great at providing firmware updates to correct issues or bugs that might present themselves over time. A simple firmware update corrected problems we initially encountered when using these drives. Hard to beat that!!

Either of these drives should be considered when you need an upgrade or decide to finally purchase a DVD writer to add to your system.

Where To Buy

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