Philips DVDR824P DVD+RW - Page 13

Conclusion

The new DVDR824P recorder is definitely a good answer of Philips against the competition of DVD writers in the market, offering the highest writing speeds for DVD recording, and very good performance as a CD-RW drive as well.

The supported 8x DVD+R writing offers impressive recording times, almost the same with Plextor PX-708A. Our 4.315GB DVD movie file was burned in only 8:00 minutes. The drive also burned the same files to a 4x DVD+RW disc in 14:09 minutes. Although the supported media list for 8x is currently very limited, it is expected to be wider as soon as more media manufacturers support 8x recording.

The drive did not manage to achieve quality score with the ABEX TCD-721R test disc but fortunately that didn't happened with Abex TCD-726 which was much easier for the drive to read. The drive also had excellent performance with our CD-Check Audio Test Disc, where it managed to read the 1.5mm defected area without reporting any audible clicks.

The DVD error correction tests showed that Philips is capable of reading accurately all the ABEX DVD-ROM discs (defected / scratched) by ALMEDIO, independently of the defected areas dimensions.

Another important issue, however, is that the drive didn't manage to make working backups of all the game protections we tested. The lack of DAO RAW 96 writing feature means that the drive cannot create working backups of protections based on subchannel data such as the SecuROM. However the drive is able to handle the protected Audio CDs. Key2Audio was not a problem for the drive but it could be better with CDS200 where occurred many mutes and skip errors.

Although the supported 24/10/40 capabilities is not the fastest among the compatible drives, the average writing times are quite low. The maximum DAE speed is 40x.

The 3T jitter measurements were positive with an exception at 24x where the jitter values were quiet increased. However the quality measurements (C1 C2) were adequate with all the media we tested at 16x and 24x with an exception with the SKC media, which gave back high C1 and C2 error rates.

The PI/PO measurements saw that the drive has good writing quality with all the DVD media we tested. However with the Mitsubishi Chemicals 8x DVD+R media the average PI and PO error rate was increased at the outer area of the disc far beyond the acceptable level.

The Philips DVDR824P price is not currently available in the market, at least under the Philips brand. The recent joint venture of Philips with BenQ gives candidate users the chance to own the DVDR824P under the BenQ brand, with the DW800 DVD writer. Priced at $150~190, it is an attractive solution for fast DVD recording. In the meantime, NEC, Optorite, Pioneer and others (OEM) have already announced 8x dual writers, so the following months are expected to be really interesting.

Written and Edited by

Constantin Kioulafas, Tony Veglis