AutoStrategy:
While Plextor works hard to add support for as much media as they can, they can't possibly test all of it and include it in the firmware. For this unsupported, or unknown, media there is AutoStrategy technology. Developed by Taiyo Yuden, AutoStrategy automatically tests and catalogs unknown media, developing a writing strategy on the fly.
IntelligentTilt:
The best reading and writing quality occurs when the angle between the disc and laser is 90 degrees. If a disc is warped or uneven, the laser beam will not be positioned correctly. To remedy this, Plextor developed Intelligent Tilt technology. By using a liquid crystal in the optical pickup and a three dimensional tilt actuator mechanism, Intelligent Tilt ensures that the focal point of the laser is positioned correctly. Plextor claims that this enables high quality recordings with any media, including double layer discs. The graph below represents the Jitter levels with Intelligent Tilt both on and off.
PowerRec
PoweRec stands for Plextor Optimized Writing Error Reduction Control. This technology checks the quality of the media and automatically selects the optimum writing speed. When you insert a disc into the drive, PoweRec identifies the media and compares it to a large database of supported media stored in the firmware. This database includes information about the media, including its maximum recording speed. If not supported, the drive will run OPC tests to check the characteristics and current conditions. From this it can choose the best laser power and speed for the media being used.
PoweRec also monitors the media on the fly by checking the writing quality at set intervals. If it detects that the drive is creating too many write errors, it will modify the writing strategy and laser power, keeping the writing quality at an optimum level.
VariRec
This technology not only improves the quality of recorded audio and data by minimizing jitter and reducing error rates, it also allows the user to manually adjust the drive's laser power.
GigaRec
Plextor's GigaRec technology can increase the capacity of your CD-R media by up to 40%. For example, if you're using a standard 80 minute disc that is 700MB in size, GigaRec will let you squeeze almost 1GB of data, or 111 minutes of audio, onto it.
While this technology has been around for a number of years, Plextor has been pretty tight lipped about how this works. According to some of the documentation Plextor has provided, GigaRec ignores the information encoded onto the CD (manufacturer, maximum write capacity, etc) and compresses the size of the pits and lands on the disc. By doing this, it can "extend" the capacity of the media.
SecuRec
Plextor's SecuRec technology lets you protect the data on a CD-R disc with a password. To view the contents of the CD, the user must enter the correct password first. This password can be entered through PlexTools Professional or the SecuViewer client.
SilentMode
While Plextor's new DVD writer is normally pretty quiet, the sound coming from the drive can be reduced even further using Silent Mode. By enabling this feature through PlexTools Professional, you can modify the drive's tray load/unload speed, spin up/down speed and write/read speeds.
Q-Check
PlexTools Professional also includes a number of tests that can be used to measure and display the characteristics of the drive and media being used. Along with reading and writing transfer rate tests, it includes a system to check the writing quality of your CD's and DVD's. Called Q-Check, this system can be used to measure a number of different things, including C1/C2 errors, focus and tracking errors, beta/jitter rates and PI/POF errors.
