X-bit labs

LiteOn SOHW-1213S Dual DVD±RW Recorder Review (page 8)

Category: Storage

by Vasily Melnik

[ 10/08/2004 | 12:04 PM ]

DVD Burn Quality

Verbatim DataLifePlus (Mitsubishi Chemical) media were used for this test. First let’s see what time it takes to burn a DVD disc.

The Lite-On is slightly – by 10 seconds – faster than the Plextor with DVD-R discs, working at 4x speed. When they both work at 8x, the gap becomes much wider – about 2 minutes. The SOHW-1213S is also faster than the Plextor PX-712A working with DVD+R media. The drives are similarly fast with rewritable media (both –RW and +RW) at their maximum as well as 4x burn speeds.

Before evaluating the DVD burn quality, I’d like to note that 12x blanks are rather rare in the market, so you may want to burn 8x media at 12x speed, if the drive permits.

Let’s start out with write-once media.

  

DVD+R written at 4x speed

The burn process finished without problems, slumps or failures, and the graph is smooth and clear. The quality of the written disc is high. There is neither PI nor PO error peaks. The level of PI errors never exceeds 20-23, while the maximum PO peak is only 2-3 errors. The graph of reading the written disc – smooth, without jaggies – confirms the high burn quality.

  

DVD+R written at 8x speed

The drive is using the Z-CLV algorithm starting from 8x speed. I can’t call it optimal from the point of view of speed, especially at high speeds (when the burning is accomplished in two or three stages). P-CAV would be preferable, I guess. As for the burn process itself, there were no problems. The drive achieved 8x speed at 0.6GB and never slowed down thereafter. The quality of the written disc is excellent, too. The PI/PO error levels have become lower than at 4x, although slightly so. There are no peaks. The best confirmation to this fact is the clear and smooth graph of reading the disc written at 8x.