X-bit labs

More DVD Discs in Our Lab: Say “No” to Scratches! (page 7)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 07/19/2005 | 01:51 PM ]

Conclusion

The release of TDK ScratchProof DVD media is great news for those users who need DVD discs capable of standing high workloads and better protected against accidental physical damages in case of careless or improper usage. Actually, it is still pretty hard to check how true the manufacturer’s statement about “100 times better anti-scratch protection” of the new discs is, but believe that TDK would hardly make a statement like that without really good grounds. As far as quality of these discs is concerned, there is nothing we can complain about: all the error rates are within the allowed limits. If you feel comfortable with the 8x writing speed, then these discs may be a pretty good choice for you.

The DVD-RW 4x discs from TDK and Verbatim (MCC) also showed quite acceptable results. It is especially true for the latter. The less impressive DVD burning quality results were obtained on the older LiteOn SHOW-1653S drive, and are most likely to result from the drive’s firmware version. Therefore, we assume that the new firmware for this drive may help improve the situation. The side by side comparison of the results obtained on the two different drives, Sony and LiteOn, gives us the right to hope so.

Of course, the best results can only be obtained if you have the most optimal combination of the hardware components, so we wish you good luck in achieving that. The new TDK discs should definitely make this task a lot easier now.