LiteOn SHM-165P6S

Review Pages

The SHM-165P6S is a Super Multi release which can read and write most of the known media formats, including DVD-RAM media at a speed up to 5X (both reading and writing). The drive reported good reading for DVD±R/RW media at 12X, however competing drives have already reached 16X for the DVD±R formats. Throughout these pages, we've put the drive to the test, to check its reading/writing capabilities with various formats. And now, we can sum up and give you an overall image of the drive's capabilities as well as any shortfalls.

The 48X reading speed available with CD media, as well as its reading capabilities in comparison to the other drives, makes the SHM-165P6S a good reader, not the fastest out there, but still a fast one with good CD error correction. Unfortunately, the drive cannot read 90/99mins audio media, but can overburn CD media, up to 99mins. DVD reading speeds were good, but we would like to see faster speeds with DVD±R while a higher ripping speed with DVD-Video CSS would be welcomed. DVD error correction was also very good.

How well did the SHM-165P6S do when ripping protected media? Well, from what we've seen from the tests we've put it through, the drive could rip and successfully produce backups of all three audio protected discs, while with protected games, its performance was average and as with most recent drives, it could not create working backups of the latest Safedisc protected games.

CD writing quality, as was confirmed by most of our tests is good, although with the strict Clover System test bed, tended towards average. Even in this case, no E22 and E32 errors were reported while we shouldn't forget that the writing speed was at 48X, which is usually too high to expect good quality burns.

With DVD media, the overall writing quality is good. In most cases the error rates in Plextools are within the acceptable levels while almost all discs produced a smooth graph in Nero CD-DVD Speed. However, increased error counts in some cases could indicate short life span for some burns, so there is still room for improvement here in a future firmware release. With DVDRW media, the results indicated average quality while a further improvement is required with DVDR DL discs.

Although the drive cannot overburn DVD media, it has plenty of other features. Bitsetting is supported through the Booktype tool LiteOn provides from its web site and the procedure is very easy as described in the previous pages. Region Free Utilities are also available, as with most LiteOn devices. Last but not least, the user can check the drive's media list through the use of some utilities which are well known to LiteOn and DVD-Rec enthusiasts in general. Note also, that the drive can be used to measure the writing quality of discs.

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