CD Freaks presents LG GSA-4040B triple format recorder review

We have rarely had a drive looking so good on the paper and still
failing so completely to impress us. The reading and writing quality of
this drive is in many cases just not good enough. It does have its
benefits by supporting the DVD-RAM format that is fine for backup
purposes, but else to slow. Also the retail package is pretty complete and
the documentation is good. It do support 'Correct EFM encoding" allowing
it to make backups of safedisc protected discs without much trouble, but
you should use another reader to read the image as the reading quality of
the LG GSA-4040B is so bad that it creates more read errors than there
should be. Another fine thing is that it supports reading all protected
audio discs, again the bad thing is that according to the CD-speed
advanced audio test, the drive is so bad at extracting audio that you
don't know if the music is extracted correctly. Another advantage is that
it supports 24X CD-R writing compared to 16X CD-R writing of many other
drives, which is actually not as fast as you think since it starts at 12X
writing and uses Zone-CLV technology to reach 24X. And if this was not
enough the drive do not support writing all discs at 24X either, and some
it writes with very low quality. This disappoints us pretty much, could it
be that difficult to write all discs at 24X with good quality? After all
the discs is 48/52X certified and works with few problems at 40X or higher
in normal CD-Writers.

But how is it for DVD-Writing then? Well it wrote
all 4X DVD+R discs at 4X without problems, but according to our quality
tests the writing quality is questionable with some discs, including discs
from known quality manufacturers such as Taiyo Yuden and Ricoh. Maybe it's
better for DVD-R? It depends on how you look at it, it did write all discs
without problems but do not expect that all 4X discs will work at 4X; most
cheaper ones do only work at 2X. Write quality with DVD-R was in most
cases good enough, since many DVD-R discs are of very low
quality we expected some discs to show some
problems.