Intelligent Recording

This technology is intended to improve the quality of written optical discs. It consists of two sub-technologies: AutoStrategy and Intelligent Tilt.

The former is the result of half a decade of Taiyo Yuden’s researching ways to improve the quality of writing to optical discs. It was first implemented in silicon in the Sanyo LSI LC897492FL chipset. Its gist is in the following: encountering a blank disc for which there’s no burn strategy stored in the drive’s firmware, the drive enables the “self-training” mode, trying to find the optimal parameters of burning. After the burn session the results are written into a special area in the drive’s flash memory (which can store up to 32 such entries). The user can check out manually at which speeds the unidentified disc will be written with the best quality.

The burn quality improves with each burn session with blanks of this particular type. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find blanks which the PX-716A would be unfamiliar with, so I couldn’t check this technology out in practice. But according to other testers, the quality of the written disc would improve greatly after three burn sessions with discs of that type. So, the technology does work and allows the user to extend the catalog of discs for which the drive has optimal burn strategies, without waiting for an official firmware update.

The other part of Intelligent Recording technology – Intelligent Tilt – is a method of improving the quality of the written discs by ensuring that the laser beam falls on the surface of the disc at a constant angle. We have already met such technologies in products from Pioneer and Samsung. They are implemented in different ways, though. In the first case, they use a plate with a layer of liquid crystals which is placed on the path of the laser beam. In the second case, a tracking mechanism is adjusting the position of the PHU lens. Plextor doesn’t reveal how exactly Intelligent Tilt works, only mentioning a special design of the head with three degrees of freedom which allows adapting the burn process depending on the crookedness of the surface of the disc. I would suppose that this mechanism is closer to Samsung’s solution, though. The reduction of jitter, as promised by the manufacturer, is shown in the diagram above.

VariRec

This technology should be well-known to the user community since the Premium series of optical drives. Its key point is in giving the user the opportunity of manually adjusting the power of the laser depending on the burn speed, the active layer employed in the medium and the personal preferences as well as on the goals the disc is created for. This adjustment can bring the biggest effect is used for creating audio CDs. For example, deliberately increasing the laser power you increase the jitter rate (I mean “optical” rather than the “acoustical” jitter), but also increase the contrast of the disc which would ensure its better readability in some player models.

This burn mode may be not very necessary for an ordinary user, but it may be indispensable in those rare cases when you do need it. None of other manufacturers offers such fine-tune adjustments in their products.