Urban Giraffe

Conclusion

This is just about the best value notebook DVD writing drive there is. It seems to be aimed at the mass OEM market, and it would not be surprising to see it being used as the drive for a lot of notebooks and other devices in the future.

Like most upgrades, once you have it you don’t want to go back. Gaining a CD burner was a major step. Gaining a DVD burner is another major step. The Panasonic UJ-845 fits the bill perfectly, and covers as many bases as you could need. It’s small, fully functional, and low cost. It’s a great buy.

Good:

• Great value
• Dual-layer
• One of the few DVD-RAM supporting notebook drives
• Slot-loading

Bad:

• Inability to rip DVDs from other regions.
• Noisy insert and eject

Links

Panasonic UJ-845
DVDDecrypter
Nero
ExactAudioCopy
Panasonic's WinXP UJ-845 utlities (include DVD-RAM driver to allow better use in Windows)