Testing Participants

As we mentioned at the beginning, this review is about the media rather than about the optical drives. So, the results are grouped by disc, and we start out with the DVD+R format.

Digitex DVD+R 8x

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The first summary table and the accompanying screenshots show you the results of the Digitex DVD+R 8x disc. Some comments about the table: for easier reading, the measured maximums of errors that conform to the ECMA requirements to quality discs are given in blue. Green marks discs that comply with these requirements according to both test programs. Yellow marks discs that successfully pass the quality test in one of the test programs. Orange signifies that none of the test programs consider this disc as a quality medium.

There are no results in the table for the sample of the disc recorded at 8x speed by the Pioneer DVR-109 drive because the drive wouldn’t burn the blank at this speed, although Nero listed it as possible in its dialog window.

So, what do we have here? The results of the surface scan tell about a high quality of the blanks. Even though besides the above-mentioned incompatibility the maximums of errors are formally higher than the norm in four graphs more, we only have real problems with the disc recorded at 8x by the Plextor PX-712A.

In the other two cases, the discs recorded at 4x by the Plextor PX-712A and the LG GSA-4163B do exceed the allowable maximum of PI failures, but they are not that bad in practice. In the first case, the corresponding KProbe graph has small red bars on the horizontal axis which mean the quality of the medium is high, while the spike of 68 failures is not visible at all. The CD-DVD Speed diagram for the other drive shows a single spike of 88 failures at the very beginning of the disc. Thus, these problems must be due to some accidental factors as the graph from another test program where the errors are all within the acceptable ranges, suggests.

The NEC ND-3520A 8x achieved the best burn quality on the Digitex DVD+R 8x, while the Plextor PX-712A was the least confident of the participating optical drives in this test.