FREECOM Fx-50 DVD+/-RW - Page 9

Writing Quality Tests - 3T Jitter Tests

To test the writing quality of the Freecom drive we burned the same Nero compilation on six different media and then measured their Pit and Land Jitter. The 3T Pit & Land Jitter graphs are presented here.

- 3T Pit results

Here, we have to mention that one of our written discs(AM), was not readable by the Pit-Land measurement drive although it was fully readable by all other drives on which we tested it. The C1C2 measurements of that disc reported errors much higher than the acceptable level and that confirms the inability to read the disc.

All written media returned high Pit values. The above graph shows that the Pit values of Professional and Intenso media were higher than the 35ns Red Book limitation at almost all measurements. On the other hand, CMC and Samsung media returned the best quality and the most stable values.

The average 3T Pit Jitter values for all recording speeds are illustrated in the following table.

The graph shows that the average Pit Jitter of Professional media is 37.34ns, a value over the 35ns Red Book limitation indicating that it is not a safe solution for quality writing. The lowest average measurement comes from the CMC media while Samsung is also quite acceptable.

- 3T Land results

The Land Jitter graph shows that most problems for the Freecom drive are located at the end of the writing task. All previous reported media increased the Land values after the 70min mark where these values are much higher than the 35ns Red Book limitation. Once again CMC proved to be a safe buy for quality writing.

The following average values graph confirms the very good burning quality of the Freecom recorder.

The average Land Jitter graph shows that only the Intenso media exceeds the 35ns Red book limitation and that is the worst quality written disc. Professional media seems to have low average Land Jitter but as we show on the previous graph, there are areas that the Land Jitter values are much higher than the acceptable limit.

- Summary

The Freecom FX-50 did not meet our expectations for quality writing with CD-R media. One media brand was written at such low quality level that we were not able to include it on the above graphs. Three of the other five media gave back values over the 35ns Red Book limitation while the remaining two returned marginal results.