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| Product: QPS Que! CD-R/RW Drive |
Company: QPS |
| Web: www.qps-inc.com |
Phone: 800-559-4777 |
| Platform: PC or Mac |
SRP: US$200
Street Price: $170 |
Cred Rating: | Special Award:
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For some, "back to school" means returning to the luxury of a high-speed Internet connection, with all the wonders of shareware, music downloads and plentiful of ...ah... online photography that such a connection provides. To make the most of these higher education fringe benefits, you need one essential tool: a CD-R/CD-RW burner. The QPS Que! fills this burnin' need at a price that'll keep a little green in your wallet for a few trips to Taco Bell.
When I opened the box, I was surprised to find that the drive itself is large, monstrously large. It's a standard 5.25" drive encased in a transparent black plastic shell, clearly designed to look at home next to an iMac or other iCandy-glad gear. The shell has a handsome sculptural look, but is excessively bulky, extending unnecessarily far away from its internal components. There's at least two inches of unnecessary extension in the back. It's also heavy -- with power supply and cords, it weighs in at about 3 lbs. I was hoping it would be closer to the size of a portable CD player, not a thick hardback book.
On the upside, it was nice to find that QPS included some extras. The drive comes with a nice leatherette carrying case, an installation CD loaded with bonus programs, a blank CD-RW, and an unmarked mystery CD that turned out to be a blank CD-R, were included. There were also power and USB cables, both necessary since the Que! drive cannot get enough juice from the USB connection alone. Inside the drive, QPS has added a 2MB buffer to help prevent buffer under-runs.
The software package includes Nero CD Burner (for burning CD-R/RWs), the Nero Media Player (for playing music files), the Nero Wave editor, InCD (for creating UFD CD-RWs), and data backup software. There's also software for designing and printing cover art for your CDs.
The burning software is fairly sophisticated, with a variety of options for creating both CD-Rs and CD-RWs, boot CDs, audio CDs, and video or Super Video CDs (playable on most PCs and some home DVD players). For burning CD-Rs, it's very simple to create "multi-session" CDs, which means that you can record some data in a session, then go back and add more files later. CD-Rs that are not formatted correctly or in a single session can easily become coasters when handled improperly by CD burning software, but the Nero software manages to do this reliably.
For those new to CD burning (like myself), Nero has a wizard that guides you through the process of creating audio or data CDs. Copying CDs can be done both "on the fly," directly from another CD drive on the PC, or by first copying data from the CD-ROM to the PC, then burning. Using the wizards, it's possible to burn a CD with just three mouse clicks, and the process is refreshingly intuitive. Learning some features of the system does require a little fiddling though, and the Help file could be a bit more detailed (on creating multi-session discs, for instance).
InCD allows you to format CD-RWs using the UFD format. UFB discs can be accessed exactly like a huge floppy disc (i.e. no need to open any burning software to save a file to disc). This is particularly handy if you want to automatically back up Word documents directly to CD, or download something from the Net without saving it to your hard drive first. The only problem is that a UFB-formatted CD-RW cannot be read by all CD-ROM drives, so you have to read them on a drive with special software installed.
The QPS drive runs up to 8x speed for writing data, 8x re-writing, and up to 32x for ripping CDs. These speeds are only attainable with the USB 2 standard though, so if your PC uses the older USB 1.1 standard, you'll only be able to achieve speeds half as fast. With a USB 2 port, write speeds worked out to about 8 minutes for creating a 60 minute audio CD of MP3s, plus another minute for converting from MP3 to audio track, which Nero handles automatically. Copying CDs on the fly takes about the same time, roughly one minute for every four minutes of audio content, or 13 minutes for a whole 650MB data CD. Formatting a UFB disc took about ten minutes, but after it was formatted, transferring files to the UFB disc seemed significantly faster and a more convenient for handling adding and deleting files from a CD-RW.
In the course of testing the drive, I tried every possible variant that I could think of: audio CDs, data, mixed data, video, straight copy, etc. and found the drive very reliable. I burned about twenty CD-Rs and a few CD-RWs, and created only one "coaster." This happened when I was copying an audio CD to a CD-R disc. To test its mettle, at the same time, I launched MS Word, logged on to the Net, started IE and did a history search for a site I'd recently visited. Then I tried to switch to the Nero burner to see how my CD was progressing. Nero froze, as did a few other programs, and my CD-R disc was toast. I can't really blame Nero though, since my PC's been freezing a lot lately.
The Nero media player is easier to use than other MP3 players I've tried. While there are loads of players out there, Nero's has a user-friendly interface and adds some nice features like a graphic equalizer with pre-set profiles such as "bass lift" and "cheap radio." The wave editor is also a handy little app editing music files. It allows you to cut and paste sections of songs and do effects like fading in and out between tunes -- useful for making customized mixes.
The included backup software is robust, but too complicated, and in the end, not terribly useful. I found that it didn't do anything that I couldn't do easily by hand and was more complicated than I cared to learn for the simple back-ups that I need.
Though the unnecessarily bloated size of the QPS is a turn-off, I'm impressed with the speed, the ease-of-use and the reliability of the software -- all at a really attractive price. As someone new to CD burning, I was amazed at how little time it took to get the hang of transferring files and backing up data. QPS has a similar drive capable of 16x write speeds, and even drives for burning DVD-RWs. For the price, this drive is a bargain and a perfect entry-level burner for anyone headed off to college... for backing up those important term papers, of course!
- Nate Heasely [9/4/01]
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