Battle of the Burners

16X Speed DVD+R Burning

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Here are my tests with 16x speed DVD+R burning.

There is still a shortage of the elusive 16x speed DVD media but I have obtained samples of the PRODISCR04 16x DVD+R media as used with the Memorex brand, and as the majority of the drives I have will burn this media at 16x I have decided to include my tests here. Only the official latest firmwares are used and results shown are only for the drives that will actually burn this media at 16x speed

PRODISCR04 16X speed DVD+R

01 02 00 00 A1 0F 02 00 00 03 00 00 00 26 05 3F .............&.? 00 00 00 00 00 00 07 50 52 4F 44 49 53 43 00 52 .......PRODISC.R 30 34 04 38 23 54 37 0F 02 2C 6B 02 78 63 1D 1A 04.8#T7..,k.xc.. 0E 0B 0C 0C 01 1A 1A 0C 0C 0D 0D 00 00 00 00 00 ................

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Pioneer Test Burn at the maximum 4x speed to this DVD+R media

The Pioneer DVR-108 would only burn this media at 4x speed so no further tests have been carried out in this section

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NEC Test Burn at 16X to this DVD+R Media

	The test burn on the NEC drive shows a CAV curve starting at just under 7x speed finishing at 16x speed at the very end of the burn. The dips in the burn are OPC (power calibration check points) to ensure the optimum burning strategy. The total time for the test burn was 6m10secs and the actual time to burn a full title set from the hard drive was 6m40secs
	Reading back the test burn in the NEC was impressive following almost the same curve as the burn taking 5m01sec the time differences being the OPC points during the burn process
	Reading this disc in the Toshiba DVD-ROM drive was a smooth curve with a slight glitch at the 4 gig mark possibly due to dust on the disc. The read time for this disc was 7m13sec

The Pie error showed a maximum of 110 which is higher than I would have liked but still well acceptable, jitter is a little high and rose above 15% around 3 gigs and there is a slight spike in the PIF errors around 4gig but nothing to worry about.

The movie played back OK in all my players even the one that does not like DVD+R but playback was made possible with the bitsetting utility enabling me to burn the disc as DVD-ROM book format

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BENQ DD DW1620 f/w B7H9

	The test burn on the Benq drive shows CAV curve starting at just under 7x speed and again rising to 16x speed at the end of the burn there are a lot more OPC points and the delays they produce are shorter than the NEC resulting in a burning time 5m49 seconds. A full film title set from the hard drive took 6m31secs
	Reading back the test burn was a bit slow and took 9m35sec
	Reading this disc in the Toshiba DVD-ROM drive produced a perfect curve taking 7m12sec

The PIE error rate was impressive peaking at 47 with an all time average of 18. Very low and impressive. Jitter peaked at 13.7% maintaining an average of 11.8% & the PIF errors were very low with the odd one and a peak of 5 the average being less than 1. A very good result indeed for a make I have used very little and the playback is equally as good as the charts.

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TEAC DV-W516G B4S2

The Teac DV-W516G would only burn this media at 8x speed so no further tests have been carried out in this section Although this drive is basically the same as the Memorex & Liteon the firmware on the drive prevents it from burning this media at 16x speed although from the Memorex & Liteon results it should be possible with a suitable firmware upgrade. If Teac produce a suitable upgrade to this drive then I will add it to these tests

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MEMOREX DVD+/-DLRWL1 F16 f/w BWSE2

	Here we see a smooth curve with no OPC points taking 5m58sec to complete the burn. A full DVD title set took 6m 32 sec to complete the burn process
	Reading back the test disc was a little slow and took 9m38sec
	Reading this disc in the Toshiba DVD-ROM drive was impressive going off my scale at a peak of 16.16x speed taking 4m58sec to complete the read

The PIE errors are a little high here reaching 80 at 1.5gig and peaking at 160 at 2.75 gig. The jitter rises to 15% at 1.75 gig and remains around there for the rest of the scan with a peak of 16.9, I like to see the jitter well below 15 and ideally 10-11% is what I am looking for. The PIF peaks at 10 and although this is not high I have seen better.

These errors are the second highest in this set of charts but they do not affect playback and readability which is good in both cases.

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LITEON SOHW1633S f/w BS01

	This burning chart is almost identical to the Memorex burn with only 3 seconds faster at burning, 6m02sec & the title set took 6m22sec 10 seconds faster than the Memorex, This time difference can be explained by the different time it would take to initialize the discs which is an unknown variable.
ii	Read back is 9m39sec just 1 second diferant to the Memorex
	Here again the read speed of this disc in the DVD-ROM drive is extremely fast at under 5mins

PIE errors rise to peak at 324 between 2.5 & 3gig and the PIF errors peak at 14 accordingly; the jitter goes above 15% at just under 2gig and peaks at 18.4 which is very high. The error pattern with this drive is similar to the Memorex as would be expected but there are no problems in playback or readability.

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Conclusion

The media PRODISCR04 I used is prototype samples so it may not be up to the final production standard so basically these tests are to see how the drives compare at burning at 16x speed, The Pioneer DVR-108 & the Teac DV-W516G both failed to burn this media at 16x speed so I have had to leave them out of the tests.

The burning speeds only differ by a maximum of 13 seconds with an actual burn and 21 seconds with a test burn and these differences can be accounted for in the initialisation of the burn so there is nothing to chose from here

Read back of the data burn the NEC wins hands down here being some 4m30sec faster than the rest

Read back of the disc in the Toshiba drive both the Memorex and the Liteon burns are read back about 2 minutes faster than the other two

PIE errors the Benq is the best followed by the NEC, Memorex & Liteon

Jitter the Benq again is the best followed by the NEC, Liteon & Memorex

PIF Benq, Memorex, NEC & Liteon

So with all the error rates the Benq comes out tops

With 16x speed burning we can expect an increase in error rates especially as the burning process speeds up but with all these charts there is no real cause for concern with any of these drives all of which were able to burn the 16x speed DVD+R media at full speed and be able to set the book format to DVD-ROM. A bitsetting utility is available for each drive but is make specific. I use DVDInfoPro to set the book type on all my drives it is a very useful program for these diagnostic charts. All these drives produce excellent burns and from these results I would not hesitate in recommending any of them.

Added:  Friday, October 01, 2004
Reviewer:  Flash

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