DVD burners and optical drives in general might be disappearing from laptops, but plenty of people still need them from day to day. Here are the best external DVD burners for all your disc reading and burning needs.
OB Roundup
The built-in DVD burner is getting pretty hard to find in a laptop. The oh-so-portable ultrabook category skips the optical drive to maintain super-thin profiles and to shave a few ounces off of the total weight, but the optical drive is also becoming scarce in regular laptops, where losing the DVD burner can allow for a slimmer chassis or slightly lower price. Whatever the reasons, when buying a laptop today, the optical drive isn't always part of the package.
But while the drives are disappearing, not everyone is transitioning to a discless world of cloud storage and USB drives. Plenty of software is still bound to physical discs, and not every computer has the reliable Internet connectivity needed to take advantage of the cloud. While you can rip a movie from a DVD, not everyone has the know-how to do so or the patience to convert a large DVD collection. The drives may be out of vogue, but the need for an optical drive hasn't disappeared. Enter the external DVD burner.
Whether you need to burn DVDs on the go, or just want to enjoy a Blu-ray movie now and then, there are plenty of options to choose from. The desktop bound Plextor External Blu-ray PX-LB950UE gives you all the disc reading and writing capabilities of an internal optical drive, but it's not very portable, weighing 2.65 pounds and drawing power from a wall outlet. For a much more portable option, but without speed and advanced tools, the Editors' Choice Samsung SE-506AB External Slim Blu-ray Re-Writer or the top-rated Pioneer BDR-XD04 are both immensely more portable.
No need for Blu-ray? The stylish Samsung SE-218BB Ultrathin Optical Disc Drive ($59.99 list) has an attractive design while offering support for both Windows and Mac operating systems. And it's hard to beat to price of the Lite-On eNAU708, which might not be as pretty, but still reads and burns to a variety of DVD and CD formats and comes bundled with software for data sharing with iOS devices.
For a standalone solution that you can also give to a technophobic family member, the Plextor PlexEasy DVD makes copying files to and from discs dead simple, and you don't even need to have a PC handy to use it.
FEATURED IN THIS ROUNDUP:
0 comments:
Post a Comment