Its a four years now since I purchased my first DVD burner the Pioneer DVR-103 for just under £350. The drive burnt at 1x speed taking a full hour to burn a full 4.7gig DVD. And whilst burning I had to hold my breath and make sure I did nothing else on the PC in fear of buffer underuns creating a £2 coaster.

How times have changed we now have a drive costing under £20 which is 5.5% of my original purchase price with 16x burning creating a full 4.7gig DVD in under 6 minutes on media which now costs as little as 10 pence
That is a decrease in burn time to 10% and a media cost decrease to 5% in just 4 years.

When I was asked if I would like to review this new Philips burner I was a little sceptical of the results in view of the under £20 price tag but I was pleasantly surprised

The drive is an OEM drive manufactured by Liteon and is the same mechanics as the Liteon SHW-1635S and SONY DW Q30A (In fact the drive identifies itself as SONY DW Q30A Y5H3 7=3 when it writes the burn data to a DVD)
It is physically quite short compared with my other DVD burners typical of the Liteon drives

Installation was straight forward I configured the jumper at the back as Master on my IDE controller card and Windows XP automatically found the drive and set the controller to operate in UDMA4.

All the 16x media I put into it showed up as 16x burn with 6x, 8x, 12x & 16x speeds being available, the burn speed of below 6x could not be selected with any 16x speed media. Surprisingly all the 16x burns achieved the 16x maximum at the completion of the burn.
DVD+R Dual Layer and Single Layer both produced discs with a DVD-ROM Book type although bitsetting was not available in DVDInfoPro & checking with the Liteon bitsetting utility confirmed that changing the type is not supported in the current firmware.

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Click on the image of the relevant disc below and the graph results will popup
TESTLAB MEDIA

I have tested the drive's performance with a variety of media and it compares favourably with the more expensive drives currently available, burning more media at 16x speed and consistently reaching the maximum speed. The burn time is just under 6 minutes for a full burn which compares favourably with other drives. Burn quality is good at between 70% & 80% for all the media I tested with Dual Layer + & - even better, playback of all the media burnt is very good without any problems.

Philips specify that the drive has "Seamless Link" which is adopted by BenQ. The drives I tested have the Liteon "Smart-Burn" and I am able to disable & enable this facility with both the Liteon utility and ImgBurn. So far I have only made one comparison and it does not appear to make much difference either way. Check it out in the DataWrite Grey results

The price tag on these drives does not reflect in the performance and I have to say these drives represent extremely good value for money