Philips DVDR1640P DL Recorder - Page 23

Conclusion

The Philisp DVDR1640P generally showed good performance in our tests. As a CD reader, it is fast with low seek times and better than average error correction. DVD reading capabilities are also good, with strongest being error correction and high transfer rate while ripping pressed DVD DL media. However, the reading speed with recordable media could be higher.

The drive is not designed for CD games backup, and for this reason it could not produce working backups of protected games. This, off course, was not an obstacle for the drive, being fast with ripping PSX and SecuROM protected test games. On the other hand, SafeDisk protection caused the drive to read for over 43 minutes.

According to our DAE test, the drive was fast and achieved a perfect quality score of 100 in Nero's CD Speed Advanced DAE test. Our 99min test audio disc was read successfully while the 90min was not.

The drive might not be good against CD games protection but it is rather good with AudioCD protections. All of our test discs were played and ripped successfully.

The Philips drive is also a good CD recorder. Even at 40X, jitter levels are not all that high in most cases. Bad performance with the one media brand should not stain the overall picture which was good.

The DVD writing qualitiy is rather good especially with the plus format. With the minus, it is also good but it seems that it depends more on the inserted media. We believe that a future firmware will improve the performance with the minus format as it should also do with the rewritable media, agian mostly for the minus format.

The DVDR1640P is set by default to DVD-ROM booktype for all plus format media. This makes the media more compatible and in the case of Double Layer media in combination with the good writng quality, constitutes one of the main advatages of the drive.

The drive is also capable of quality scans, however the results are not too good and the reading speed is extremely slow, 0.3X.

- The Good

• 16X recording speed for DVD+R media
• Supports DVD+R Double Layer media writing at 2.4X
• Supports BookType setting for DVD+R/R9/RW media resulting in the highest compatibilty on DVD-ROM and DVD stand alone devices.
• Over-speed burning with DVD+R (media can be recorded at higher speed than the media's supported writing speed)
• Supports overburning with CD-R/RW media
• Very good DVD+R, DL writing quality
• Good CD writing quality
• Excellent CD/DVD error correction
• Can be used to measure (scan) DVD±R/RW media
• Can read/rip protected Audio discs (CDS200, Key2Audio)

- The Bad

• Competition offers 4X DL writing
• Competition offers 16X DVD-R writing
• Does not support overburning with DVD±R/RW media
• Cannot backup copy protected games with most versions of SafeDisc protection
• Doesn't support reading of DVD-RAM media
• Doesn't support reading of C2 pointers

- Like To be fixed

• Burning quality with specific DVD-R media
• Low reading speed when measuring (scanning) DVD±R/RW media