Introduction
TX VENUS II 48/24/48 CDRW
I vividly remember the growing anticipation as I waited for the courier to delivery my new CDRW in the summer of '98. I had laid out £244 for an optical drive that could write at 4x, rewrite at 4x, and read at a whopping 24x. That price was cheap, too. The idea that you could do at home what it had previously taken professional equipment to do was almost unreal. Media, costing in excess of £1 per 80-minute disc, appeared cheap at the time.
Like most facets of the computing hardware industry, the surge in technology for CD-ReWriters has been nothing short of extraordinary. Whilst the maximum rated speed for DVD drives has remained fairly constant for the last couple of years, peaking out at 16x, the increases in performance, and the lowering of unit cost for CD-ReWriters, has allowed them to be specified in all but the most budget-orientated systems.
At the beginning of last year, I was adamant that 24x CD-R writing speed would be enough for me; I was quite sure that we'd reached a plateau in technological terms. That message doesn't seem to have been passed on to the various manufacturers, as we now see drives with sky-high rated speeds.
Speed sells - it's as simple as that. So, you may not be too surprised to learn that a newer breed of CD-ReWriters have hit the market, they seem to do so with the marking of every season. Boasting some impressive specifications of its own, today we're looking at the TX Venus II 48/24/48 CD-ReWriter. The numbers may give its game away, but lets see just what it brings to the table.
