DVD to go for under $200
Written: Sep 18 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Inexpensive, light, excellent PCMCIA connection
Cons: A little hard to seat the DVDs just right on the spindle
|
|
|
| korcid's Full Review: EXP PCMCIA DVD Station |
This appears to be the same product, but mine came in a box labelled:
EXP Portable PC Card DVD-ROM Drive with S/W MPEG2 Decoder
"The easiest way to add DVD capability to your notebook!"
I've had a Toshiba Satellite notebook for some time now. It's reasonably fast, durable, and, at about $900, it's almost disposable - which is important for a piece of hardware that will be totally obsolete in 2 years anyway. Unfortunately, this approach to laptop buying does leave me lusting after the latest techno-goodies crammed into all those $3,000 machines you see in advertisements.
Fortunately for me, one of the latest goodies, DVD, can be added to laptops using EXP's cool PCMCIA DVD unit. This unit is an external drive (powered by either an AC adapter or through the PCMCIA card from the laptop's battery) that functions exactly as an internal DVD drive would. You've probably seen the Sony ads for their Vaio notebooks, which have built-in DVD: the ad shows a guy walking up to the X-ray machine at airport security and putting a TV, a VCR, a boom box, etc. etc. onto the belt, and then going to the other end of the machine to get his stuff when it comes out to find….a laptop. Well, the big benefit of this for me is that I can take movies with me when I travel. Since I travel a lot for my work, the idea of adding DVD to my laptop was pretty enticing to me - but not enticing enough for me to trade up to a $3,000 disposable computer.
A DVD drive is a CD-ROM drive that has quite a bit more capacity. The EXP unit can read CD-ROM formats as well, so you could conceivably use this as your sole CD-ROM drive on a laptop that has no built-in CD. The EXP DVD unit will also play audio CDs, but this take a bit of finagling (and I have a perfectly good CD drive in my Toshiba that can do this already).
I decided to poke around to see what was available at CompUSA - nada. I checked a couple of online PC vendors - nothing. In desperation, I checked on eBay - BINGO. There were quite a few offered, and one, being offered by ezupgrades.com, seemed to fit the bill entirely. I bid for one, got outbid, and, a couple of days later, bid on another that the same people were selling. It arrived about as quickly as anything I have ordered from online hardware vendors, and certainly faster than some (about 5-6 days, via UPS).
I will go over the benefits that EXP lists on the box to let you know what is true and what is hype:
Benefits:
Access the latest in DVD media software - up to 17GB
The EXP DVD certainly does this, although I haven't tested it on anything but movies. Frankly, there isn't much out there besides movies right now. And, without a DVD burner, all that matters is that it will read any DVD you put in it, which it certainly has so far.
Bundled MPEG2 decoding software, lets you watch DVD movies anywhere
The bundled program (Cyberlink PowerDVD 2.55) is a pretty good DVD viewing program. I've used a few of these (mostly those bundled with other laptops or desktops that did have built-in DVD), and this one seems as robust as any of them, although the copy I got with my EXP drive was sadly lacking a manual. A couple of the commands (how to switch from the internal to the EXP external CD drive being the most important) were a bit hard to find, but once I did it the program was at least as easy to work as my vcr, and in many ways much more powerful. As for being able to watch DVD movies anywhere, yes, this is true, although you will need a flat surface that will hold the DVD drive as well as your laptop. In my experience, this limits "anywhere" a bit - perhaps "anywhere except a coach seat on Northwest Airlines" would be more appropriate. I have tested it in first-class seats, and it works pretty well there.
Compatible with CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW media
I've tested the EXP unit with all three data media, and it does seem to work. I won't be giving it much of a workout with them, though, as the CD capability only functions at about 16x speed, which is slower than the internal CD in my laptop. I just bought this unit for watching movies, and the compatibility there is quite good.
Very lightweight and small, slim-line front loading system - only 1.3lbs
The part about being very light is absolutely true. The part about being 1.3 lbs. is close enough - my postal scale showed it to weigh 21.9 ounces. A word about loading - it's a bit finicky, and the claps that hold the CD on the spindle don't always snap, leaving the CD spinning a bit lopsided on the spindle. This is something you have to be pretty careful with, as the DVD won't play at all if it's not in absolutely straight. Clearly, other CD drives make this much more of a no-brainer.
Windows 95/98/2000 compliant
I've tried it on 95 and 98. I don't have Win2K, but I can't see any reason why it would NOT work.
Easy installation
Installation was a little bit of a trick, as I had to play with the hardware setting in device manager to get Windows to recognize the drive.
Two sources of power - notebook computer's power or AC adapter
This is true, although the drive doesn't seem to drain battery too quickly, so I don't know when I would use the AC adapter included. It seems like a waste, really, since power drain is no problem if there is a plug nearby.
Lifetime technical support
I've had no need of tech support, so I can't say on this one.
Full one-year manufacturer's warranty
Also, no way to test this one, yet.
Dimensions: 170mmx145mmx25.5mm
This is about right. I'd say the thickness is closer to 20mm.
Interface: PCMCIA Type I card
Data transfer rate: Sustained Mode 1350-2700 KB/sec
Burst (ATAPI): 16.7MB/sec
Buffer cache size: 128KB
Average random seek time (CD) 110ms
Average random access time (CD): 120ms
I'll give you these specs just for completeness. I have no way of saying whether these are true. I can tell you that this unit played movies full screen on my 300Mhz laptop without any difficulties.
Overall, I certainly got a good deal on this, and consider it a much better way to go than paying a $500 premium to get DVD in a notebook. The added space requirement of an external drive is sometimes annoying, but for the money, it's a workable solution.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
korcid
|
|
Reviews written: 18
Trusted by: 10 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.