Positive:

• Outstanding writing performance on DVD±R/DL.
• Excellent/very good CD-R/RW writing quality and compatibility.
• Excellent/very good DVD±R/RW writing quality.
• Excellent/Very good DVD±R DL writing quality.
• Can burn selected DVD±R/DL 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 BitSetting (BookType DVD-ROM) on DVD+R/RW/DL.
• Supports Disc Quality Scanning with CD-Speed and KProbe.
• Good software bundle.
• Can read/write MINI DVD.
• Can overburn CD-R and read and write 100 minute CD-R

Negative:

• Single coloured read/write LED

Conclusion:

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

The main positive points:

The Samsung SH-S203B is the fastest drive we have tested here on CD Freaks as far as writing DVD media is concerned. Being a so called multi-drive, the Samsung SH-S203B supports all of the currently popular CD/DVD formats including DVD-RAM.

The Samsung SH-S203B was able to burn all our tested CD-R/RW media with excellent/very good quality and media compatibility was also very good.

DVD±R/RW writing quality was also of a very high standard and on most media excellent, the Samsung SH-S203B coping with some difficult to handle media extremely well. The Samsung SH-S203B was also able to burn selected DVD±R media at faster than its rated speed, and overall burning performance with DVD±R media was very impressive indeed. Recording the fastest write times we have seen.

The Samsung SH-S203B 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.

The Samsung SH-S203B boasts a very fast 16x writing speed on DVD+R DL media, writing a full DL disc in 10 minutes and 33 seconds was most impressive. Not only was the performance excellent, recording the fastest burn times we have seen, but also the writing quality on our tested media was mostly very impressive.

Reading performance and reliability is excellent and a big improvement in speed terms over older Samsung models.

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

The main negative points:

There are virtually no negative things to say about the Samsung SH-S203B. If we were being critical, we could say that writing quality could be improved when writing Verbatim 4x DVD-R DL media. We could also say some tweaks to a few writing strategies for DVD±R media would be welcome. We are sure this will happen with future firmware updates.

We would also like to see different coloured LED’s being used for read/write.

To sum up, this is what we would say:

“The Samsung SH-S203B is blazing fast, has a great feature set and burns media with excellent/very good quality. An outstanding effort from Samsung”

We were so impressed by the Samsung SH-S203B blazing fast performance, features and writing quality, that we decided to award the drive our prestigious CD Freaks “Editor’s Choice Award”.

By using our price grabber feature cdfreaks.pricegrabber we were unable to find a price listing for the drive.

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