TEAC DV-W512G Dual DVD±RW Recorder - Page 1

has a long tradition with CD and DVD recorders. Following on the footsteps of competing manufacturers, TEAC has released a new drive supporting 12X writing speed for +R and 8X writing speed for -R formats. The competition already has various drives available on the market with similar specifications, making the buyers decision a tough one. We compare the drive with the LiteON SOHW-1213S and Plextor PX-712A to see which drive is the fastest and at the same time, how good is the writing quality, a very important consideration for most users...

- Features

The drive features 12X DVD+R, 8X DVD-R, 4X DVD±RW, 48X CD-R and 24X CD-RW maximum burning speeds. Reading speeds are at 12X for DVD±R/RW/ROM and 48X for CD-R/RW. It also offers the features listed below:

• BURN-Proof avoiding Buffer UnderRun Error, Automatically adjusting writing strategy & running OPC to provide the best burning quality
• Generic Write control Automatically adjusting writing strategy & running OPC to provide the best burning quality

- Specifications

The drive also uses the RPC II region control, allowing a user to change the drive's region at most 5 times, which however can easily be bypassed with various utilities.

Below are the drive's main specs as given by NeroInfoTool and DVDInfoPro:

KProbe software offers additional information:

- Retail package

The retail package includes the drive, a quick installation guide, mounting screws, IDE cable, sound cable and one 8X DVD+R media from TEAC (Ritek R03 media ID code). Also included software Nero v6 OEM version.

On the front panel, there are as usual on the tray the US-RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+RW logos. The phono jack, the sound level control and the activity indicator light are located on the left side and below the disc tray. On the right side there is only the eject button.

On the rear panel you can see the analogue and digital outputs (SPDIF), the IDE connector and the power input.

The drive is a half-height internal device, much shorter than the usual CD/DVD recorder, making mounting a breeze even in PCs with small cases. Below you can see a picture of the drive with noticeably smaller dimensions compared with the Plextor Premium drive.

Removing the screws and opening the drive's cover voids the drive's warranty. For reference reasons, we post the following pictures. You can click on the mainboard picture for a higher resolution image:

The TEAC DV-W512G further incorporates (located on the underside of the controller circuit board), a high-speed DVD dual Optical Disk Controller chipset from MediaTek Inc. consisting of two CMOS ultra-scale integrated circuits, the MT1816E and MT1828E. The MT1816E is the front-end analog signal processor and the MT1828E is the servo control and Endec IC. The pickup system is the Sanyo SF-DB 10SA.

- Installation

The drive was installed as secondary master and WindowsXP recognized it as "TEAC DV-W512G". The drive arrived with firmware vT4S5, which was updated to vT4S6 (unofficial version based on LiteON SOHW-1213S VTS0C) to support the latest media codes.

Below is a picture from Nero Burning Rom, showing the drive's specs.

As was stated earlier, we will be comparing the drive with the LiteON SOHW-1213S and Plextor PX-712A, since these drives have similar DVD/CD recording specs.

- Testing software

In order to perform our tests we used:

1. Nero CD-DVD Speed v3.12
2. CDVD Benchmark v1.21
3. ExactAudioCopy v0.9 beta5
4. Nero Info Tool v2.22
5. KProbe v2.3.2 (Reader: LiteOn LDW-811S firmware vHS0Q, Reading speed 8X CAV)
6. PlexTools v2.16 (Reader: Plextor PX-712A firmware v1.04, Reading speed 8X CLV for CD-R)
7. DVDInfoPro v2.54
8. LiteOn Booktype Utility v1.0.6
9. Nero Burning Rom v6.3.1.17