Red-Hot Stuff: 11 DVD Burners Reviewed : Silent Night, Speed Of Light

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Red-Hot Stuff: 11 DVD Burners Reviewed

12:02 PM - 10/27/2003 by Patrick Schmid

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1 – Silent Night, Speed Of Light
2 – Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About DVD Recording, But Were Afraid ...
3 – Increasing Speed: Disc Manufacturers Falling Behind
4 – Test Procedure: Reading, Ripping, Grabbing, Burning And Playback
5 – Test Procedure: Discs And DVDs Used
6 – Discs And DVDs Used, Continued
7 – Gigabyte GO-W0404A
8 – Gigabyte GO-W0404A, Continued
9 – HP DVD300e
10 – HP DVD300e, Continued
11 – HP DVD300e, Continued
12 – HP DVD300i
13 – HP DVD300i, Continued
14 – LG GSA-4040B
15 – LG GSA-4040B, Continued
16 – LG GSA-4040B, Continued
17 – Mitsumi DW-7802TE
18 – Mitsumi DW-7802TE, Continued
19 – NU DDW-081
20 – NU DDW-081, Continued
21 – Philips DVDRW416
22 – Philips DVDRW416, Continued

23 – Pioneer DVD-A06
24 – Pioneer DVD-A06, Continued
25 – Sony DRX-510UL
26 – Sony DRX-510UL, Continued
27 – Sony DRX-510UL, Continued
28 – Teac DV-W50D
29 – Teac DV-W50D, Continued
30 – Traxdata RW1300
31 – Traxdata RW1300, Continued
32 – Test System, Configuration And Benchmarks
33 – Benchmark Results
34 – DVD Performance, Continued
35 – DVD Performance, Continued
36 – Data Transfer Diagrams: CD Performance
37 – CD Performance, Continued
38 – CD Performance, Continued
39 – Test Results
40 – Test Results
41 – Media Check On Hi-fi DVD Players
42 – Conclusion: Some Detail Problems Spoil The Overall Picture
43 – Features Table
44 – More on this topic

Fewer than three years ago, mainstream recordable DVD players cost more than $400. To add to the pain were several different recordable DVD format standards, which rendered some DVDs incompatible with different standard players. But now, the DVD burner world is a more pleasant one in which to buy and burn.

The prices for fast DVD burners have slipped into the affordable range. Even the disk media is, bit per bit, no longer more expensive than the CD. Producing your own data or video DVDs has, thus, gotten that much more cheaper.

The format wars has given journalists much to write about while propping up prices and giving consumers headaches, but no one besides the world's largest OEMs care much anymore. PC manufacturers render the issue more and more irrelevant as drives are usually multi-mode and disks generally cost the same regardless of format. Only four of the eleven drives sent for testing make do with only DVD+R/+RW, while the nine remaining devices accommodate both formats.

However, we've got to say that technically, the plus standard offers a few advantages, as it is constantly being perfected and doesn't have to be finalized. Attributes include video applications on standalone devices, such as lossless linking and block-by-block data manipulation. However, our results show that the movies written to DVD+R by the burners were not readable for every DVD player - whereas the DVD-Rs were. Another small but significant difference is the capacity of DVD+R discs, which is 8 MB smaller, barring the possibility of directly copying a full-to-the-brim DVD-R.

The rising number of drives available gave us a good excuse to conduct this massive round-up for the first time. After all, as we know, there are not only stars and starlets out there - there is the occasional black sheep as well.

Overall, 11 drives made it into the lab for testing, among them two external devices from HP and Sony. From U.S.-based NU Technologies we received an 8x burner. Despite numerous requests, Plextor has to date not sent a test device - which is too bad, because in the area of CDs, this manufacturer has always had a good reputation.

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Anonymous 05/21/2008 6:24 PM

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Very informative review. Tedious reading and loading it though...It would have been nice to see a chart or graph at the end of the article with all the drives together. This loading page after page after page sucks big time. too much other crap. Otherwise, I did find what I was looking for. Thanks Tom's Hardware!

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