Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This isn't a bad unit once you get your head wrapped around it. I purchased this for use on a Mac Pro (early-2008 edition with 8 cores and 32gb of RAM) to produce some set-and-forget DVD burn jobs. Therefore, please understand I am only reviewing the Mac side of this device. I am using OS X 10.6.4 with the 64-bit kernel.
The software that comes with it includes a USB-to-serial driver, some nauseating disc burning software named "Discribe Robotic v7.07" and a mysterious Lightscribe.pkg file. The manual includes some worded instructions on how to unpack the unit and set it up. This was one of the first symptoms of an issue. The instructions were not entirely user-friendly and some illustrations would really, really help. Unfortunately, there are none.
The setup instructions for the software aren't too bad. It gives you the proper order to install components and away you go... err, not. The USB-to-serial driver that comes with the unit is v1.2.1 and apparently does not feature x86_64 kernel support. On top of that, the unit started acting *very* erratically when I turned it on. It would burn about 50mb of the disk, then flake out and dump all of the discs into the output bin one by one. It turned out this driver was not at fault, but during troubleshooting I went to the Prolific website and discovered that they have a newer version of this driver for OS X 10.6 and it includes 64-bit kernel support. I downloaded it - it's version 1.4.0 and it seems to work fine.
Now, back to the erratic behavior. It turns out this unit is *extremely* intolerant of long USB cables. You will need to use a short USB cable or many powered USB hubs if you need to get the unit into another area or room. After I hooked it up to a smaller 4-foot cable, the unit started acting just fine.
One other note to be aware - lightscribe burning is a little slow. The unit will finish burning the next DVD before the Lightscribe job finishes on a disc so the robot sits there for a while. For a very small, non-complex Lightscribe label it took 23 minutes to burn. There were no graphics, just fonts from Illustrator. Okie, technically I guess that would be viewed as graphics. Still, I was a little surprised at the speed.
All in all, after wrestling with this thing for about six hours and finally figuring out the USB cable length issue, it's burning the job happily and working fine. I don't *love* this unit because of the quirky software that comes with it, but hopefully it will get the job done. It seems to be doing that, so it's okie.
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