The SHW-16H5S is one of the latest releases in the DVD burners market featuring the LightScribe technology. The drive is a fast CD reader with 48X support, while in our tests, it reached 50X. Its DAE speed is also fast while it reported a perfect score in the Advanced DAE Quality Test from Nero. The only glitch was that it failed to read/rip the 90/99min test discs. With the DVD format, we confirmed the 16X reading support for DVD-ROM SL, but we would like something more than the very common 8X with DVD-ROM DL. The drive will also read up to 12X, all your DVD±R/RW discs which is rather good but 16X for the DVD±R would be much better. Its ripping ability with CSS DVD-Video discs is average to good.

Speed is always good as long as it is accompanied by quality. So, what about error correction with this drive? According to our tests, it seems to be rather good with both CD and DVD. In the case of the ABEX TCD-721R test disc, we have one of the best performances while in case of DVDs, all of the test discs were read successfully without any errors reported.

The LiteOn managed to read/rip all of the AudioCD protections we tried, but it had no luck with the latest versions of Safedisc, where it failed to create working backups of v3.1 or more recent. Previous SD versions are not something you will find on current games so there is no reason to mention them.

The CD writing speed of 48X is rather high from which to expect good quality and our tests confirmed this. All four burned media at 48X reported low quality, while the one which allowed a maximum 40X, had rather good quality. Both Plextools and Clover System agreed on this.

With DVD media, the drive managed to burn every single disc we tried at the certified speed, reporting good times, especially for the minus format. No overspeeding or overburning was possible, but these are not issues for most users. The writing strategy for both DVD+R and DVD-R is CAV.

We strongly believe that the writing quality with DVD media is the most important thing for a DVD burner. In this department, the SHW-16H5S did a good job. Most of the media we burned, from both DVD-R and DVD+R formats, reported low error rates in Plextools and smooth reading graphs in CDSpeed. Especially at 8X, the performance of the drive was rather good. In the case of 16X, it was good but with certain discs a further improvement would be welcomed. A new firmware release should also improve things with DVD RW discs, where the reported quality was average. No problems with the DL writing quality...

As with most LiteOn burners, so too, the SHW-16H5S has plenty of features. First of all, you can set the Booktype for the plus media to DVD-ROM, there is an option to make the drive region free, you can measure the writing quality on CD/DVD media, you can adjust in the firmware the maximum writing speeds for media and the last, which cannot be found on many of the latest burners, LightScribe support.

At the time of the review, the price for the SHW-16H5S was €47.50 (ex. VAT) for the bulk version, €51.88 (ex. VAT) for the retail package plus a spare bezel and €54.38 (ex. VAT) for the retail package plus a spare bezel and 4 pcs. of LightScribe DVD+R media.

- The Good

- Good CD/DVD error correction capabilities
- Good writing quality with most media
- LightScribe enabled drive
- Can overburn CD media up to 99mins
- Good retail package
- Supports BookType Setting
- 8X DVD+R DL support
- Can burn DVD+RW media at 8X, and DVD-RW media at 6X

- The Bad

- Performance with 90/99 min test discs
- Cannot create working backups with SafeDisc recent protected games
- Cannot overburn DVD recordable media
- RW writing quality with certain media

- Like To be fixed

- Writing quality with specific media

Retail Package
Reading
Error Correction
Protected Discs
Writing
Features