Positive:

• Excellent writing performance on CD-R media
• Excellent/very good CD-R writing quality and compatibility.
• Generally good/very good DVD±R/RW writing quality.
• Can burn selected DVD±R media faster than its rated speed.
• Excellent reading performance and reliability.
• Reads pressed DVD Video SL/DL and recordable media at 16x/12x.
• Supports DVD-RAM read/write at 12x speed.
• Supports automatic BitSetting (BookType DVD-ROM) on DVD+R/RW/DL.
• Supports Disc Quality Scanning with CD-Speed and KProbe.
• Good software bundle.
• The LightScribe feature worked perfectly.

 Negative:

• Noise levels are high when the drive is running at high speed.
• DVD±R DL writing quality needs improving.

Conclusion:

Let us summarize the most important positive and negative points below:

The main positive points:

The Lite-On LH-20A1L is a fast drive as far as writing DVD media is concerned and extremely fast when writing CD-R media. Being a so called multi-drive, the Lite-On LH-20A1L supports all of the currently popular CD/DVD formats including DVD-RAM. The Lite-On LH-20A1L also supports LightScribe “direct to disc labelling” and worked extremely well.

The Lite-On LH-20A1L was able to burn all our tested CD-R media with excellent/very good quality and media compatibility was also very good.

The Lite-On LH-20A1L was also able to burn selected DVD±R media at faster than its rated speed.

The Lite-On LH-20A1L also proved to be a good performer with DVD-RAM media, again recording some very fast write times with our tested 12x DVD-RAM media.

Reading performance and reliability is excellent with most media groups.

The supplied software bundle should provide a good starting point for new and more advanced users alike.

The main negative points:

There are not that many negative things to say about the Lite-On LH-20A1L.

DVD±R DL writing quality in most cases was not good and requires improvement.

The Lite-On LH-20A1L is noisy when running at high speed and caused a lot of vibration in our review PC case.

To sum up, this is what we would say:

“The Lite-On LH-20A1L is generally a good performer and has a great feature set. However, some areas need some improvement”

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