Conclusion

As we said at the beginning of this article, we wanted to solve a twofold problem in our tests. First, we wanted to check out the quality of a pile of DVD discs and, second, to see which optical drive was preferable as concerns quality burning. Have we succeeded? Not quite, because we couldn’t do in practice everything we had planned. Particularly, our reference drive Lite-On SOHW-1653S couldn’t read some media written by some of the drives. Here, we met the compatibility problem which could not be avoided. But still, a negative result may be sometimes as useful as a positive one. At least, you get a better understanding of problematic situations and ways to solve them. Compatibility issues have also risen up with the Plextor PX-712A which just couldn’t burn a number of discs in Nero Burning ROM. It’s highly possible that many such problems can be easily corrected by adjusting the software/hardware system the optical drive and the burning software constitute. We mean firmware updates, of course.

The results we have got in our tests must not be regarded as absolute truth. The quality of the same discs written in other drives may differ from what we’ve seen in our tests. It is also possible that you may encounter the above-mentioned incompatibility and your drive with its current firmware just will not burn a certain blank.

After this kind of disclaimer, we can say a few words on the tested media. In the DVD+R category, the Digitex 8x, TDK 16x and Verbatim 16x have performed well. The RIDATA 16x can be put in here, too, but none of the four optical drives could burn it at 16x, and only one drive did the burning at 8x. This must be due to the drives’ firmware, so it would be too hasty to reject this medium altogether.

The discs of the DVD-R format have been in the focus of this review due to the arrival of blanks from TDK and Verbatim rated for 16x. Both these discs have performed well. We have no concerns as to their quality. We have no such concerns about the 8x blanks from Digitex, TDK and Verbatim, either.

In the DVD+RW category, high-quality media are Imation 4x, Fujifilm 4x, L-PRO 2.4x, Sony 4x, Philips 4x, Verbatim 4x. Indeed, the rest of the participating discs aren’t hopeless, either. As for the DVD-R format, all the discs we’ve tested are high-quality products, especially the ones rated for 8x max speed. If you rewrite discs of the DVD+RW format, you’ll have a smaller chance of getting any problems with such blanks as Fujifilm 4x, Imation 4x, L-PRO 2.4x and Philips 4x. The Sony 4x, TDK 4x and Verbatim 4x are most probably going to perform well, too. As for the last, DVD-RW category, it’s harder to make any conclusions since we couldn’t test them fully. Yet, the quality of the Sony 2x, Verbatim 2x and Fujifilm 2x is impeccable.

The other aspect of this review is the optical drives. We can’t tell which one has proved to be the best. You could see for yourself that this or that drive would yield a disc of a higher quality depending on the brand of that disc. Yet, taking into account such things as stability and compatibility of the recorded media with our reference drive, the Pioneer DVR-109 seems preferable. To our surprise, it was the Plextor PX-712A that experienced more problems with the media than the others in terms of both compatibility and quality of burning. But this is most probably the fault of the particular version of the drive’s firmware.

Concluding this conclusion, we want to make an announcement our next test of DVD media. We are going to write it as soon as there appear rewritable discs with support of burn speeds above 4x and when there are more high-speed recordable discs available. We won’t forget about dual-layer DVD-Rs, either.

We will probably give up one of our test program, choosing either Nero CD-DVD Speed or KProbe because it takes huge amounts of time to test the discs in both programs.

Yet, we are still not sure about which program to use. Sometimes they yield very different results that influence our opinion about the quality of a disc much. But maybe new versions of the programs will have been released by the time of our next test session, and our choice will be more obvious?