Tested: Sony Optiarc AD-7280S 24x CD/DVD Rewritable Drive (w/New Media & Quality Scan Tests)

It’s fun being on the “trailing edge” of technology, when you get to catch-up on things you’ve always wanted to find out about, at a price you can afford. To that extent, I’ve been collecting optical media and drives, enjoying the experience of handling rare and unseen types and seeing how well they operate, almost 20 years later. To that end, it has been a small regret of mine that I had been so neglectful of NEC/Renesas-based drives. During the era, my Mediatek bias was mostly driven by the fact that they were the only drives that were considered reliable scanning drives and the fact I could really only justify spending the money on a handful of drives. In the early days, I had a bias against NEC-based drives as they often produced burns which had spikes when scanned on Mediatek drives, likely a consequence of re-linking during a burn. But towards the 16x era, I already knew that Mediatek drives were often not the best “all round” burners, as I saw excellent results from my Pioneer…