Digital Trends

Samsung TS-H552U

April 4th, 2005 | by Ian Bell

Setup and Use

Samsung includes both a detailed and a quick start guide to get you going with the installation process of the TS-H552U. We found both manuals to be well written and easy to follow. Physically installing the drive is a relatively simple process and does not require any special instructions other than making the drive the first one on the IDE channel. Once the drive is installed you will want to run the software CD which comes with the unit. TS-H552U uses their own setup menu so you can access the software you want easily.

As we have mentioned in other DVD writer reviews, we are big fans of the Nero CD and DVD writing software, so we are glad to see Samsung choose Nero for use with their drives. Nero's Burning ROM 6 SE software is what you will probably use the most. It is fast and easy to use and we did not encounter any media incompatibilities or slowdowns while writing our media. Nero's InCD 4 packet writing software is pretty solid and reliability, but may not be a necessity if you are used to using Microsoft's own packet writing software which is integrated into their Windows XP operating systems.

The main setup menu

The rest of Nero's software including their DVD editing, and backup software are not as strong as stand alone packages you can buy separately, but for the casual user they still work very well. Nero's Showtime software is similar to WinDVD or Cyberlinks PowerDVD software, but not as good in our opinion. Overall, the software suite which Samsung includes with the TS-H552U is top notch with very little to complain about.

Nero setup screen

In our tests the Samsung TS-H552U was able to compete with both the Sony DRU-700A and the MSI DR-16B DVD writers. And although the TS-H552U is suppose to have faster write speeds than the two other drives; it was a pretty close race in most of the tests with only a few seconds difference in most instances.

In our Dual layer tests, the TS-H552U clearly smashed the competition due to its faster 5X writing capabilities. Both the Sony and MSI drives are limited to only a 2.4X write speed, although both companies now have drives capable of writing dual layer media at 4X so we would expect the gap to close quite a bit. We were able to write at 4X Dual layer speeds using 1X rated Verbatim media, but were not able to write at 5X speeds using the slower media, so if you want maximum performance, make sure that you buy the highest rated media you can.

The TS-H552U seemed to really struggle when it came to writing to DVD-R media. It would write to DVD-R in record time and then just seem to hang there as it tried to close the session. We have seen this happen with other drives we have tested including the MSI drive, but when it came to the DVD-R tests, the Sony simply could not be touched.